The trip to the planetarium falls through because the building is closed, so Ms. Frizzle turns the bus into a spaceship and takes the class up through the atmosphere, out past the Moon, and around the solar system. Joanna Cole wrote it and Bruce Degen drew it, and it first came out in 1990. The copy on our shelf is the revised paperback, which the publisher says carries updated facts about the solar system.
Every page is doing three jobs at once. There is a cartoon with speech balloons, there is the running story, and there are reports on lined paper taped into the corners with the actual facts written out by hand. That layout is the whole design of the book, and it is also the reason some children love it and some cannot read a page of it.
The science it actually teaches
Most of the books on our Stealth Science shelf hide science inside a story. This one does the opposite, and it is worth being straight about that. It is openly a science book. What it hides is the schoolwork. A child who will not sit down with a book about space will sit down with a comic about a bus, and by the end of the comic the astronomy is in there anyway.
Here is what actually goes in.
The Sun is a star, and it is the only thing in the whole system making its own light. Every planet a child has ever seen in a picture is throwing sunlight back at them. A lot of children think planets glow, and this book quietly takes that idea apart.
The four inner planets are rock. You could stand on them. The big ones further out are gas and liquid with no floor under you, so there is nowhere on Jupiter to put a foot down. That difference between the rocky planets and the giants is the single most useful thing a second grader can carry out of a solar system unit, and it comes across here without a worksheet.
The Moon has no air. No air means no wind, no weather, no sound, and a black sky in the middle of full daylight. Craters stay exactly as they were made, because nothing is left to smooth them out.
Weight changes from world to world while the child does not. What is pulling on you is what changed. There is a band of rock and metal orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, left over from when the system was built. And space is not up, it is out, and there is nothing there to breathe, so every single thing a body needs has to be carried along.
That is a real unit's worth of content in a book a child will finish in one sitting and then read again.
The child it lands with
The one who asks space questions faster than you can answer them, and who has already worn out the two library books you found.
The reluctant reader in second or third grade who needs the pictures carrying half the load, and who will accept a comic long before accepting a chapter book about the same subject.
It does not land with the child who wants the big glossy reference book with the photographs from the telescopes. That child will find this loud and slow and a little silly, and that is a fair reaction rather than a wrong one.
One place to stop and talk
Stop when the bus arrives at a new planet and ask your child how long that would really have taken.
The bus does it in a page turn. A real craft flying to Mars is months in the dark with nothing outside the window, and the far end of the system is years rather than months. The book is not lying to anyone. It simply cannot draw the waiting. That is the piece almost every space book for children leaves out, and it is the one that changes how a child pictures the whole arrangement: not a set of planets sitting near each other, but a great deal of empty space with a few things in it, very far apart.
What to know going in
Check how your copy handles Pluto, and do it before your child cites the book to someone.
The book was written in 1990, when Pluto was still counted as the ninth planet. Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006. The edition we sell is the revised paperback, and the publisher's own description says the solar system facts were brought up to date for it, but the description does not say what the revision did on that particular question. Open the back half of the book, look at the planet count, and you will know in about ten seconds. If it still says nine, that is not a reason to skip the book. It is a reason to have the conversation on purpose instead of by accident, and that conversation is worth more than the page it corrects.
The second thing is the page layout. Speech balloons, the main story, the jokes and the hand-lettered reports are all competing at once. A child who needs a clean page, or who is easily pulled off the line he is reading, will find this hard going. It is also awkward to read out loud, because there is no single line to follow and you end up deciding on the fly which parts to say and which to skip.
Third, the store bands it at grades 2 to 5, and that band is about the content rather than the reading level. A second grader can take all of it in if you are reading with them, but the report text is small and dense for that age. A fifth grader can read every word alone and may well decide the cartoon format is beneath them.
There is nothing frightening in it. No death, no violence, nothing a sensitive child will carry to bed. That is worth saying plainly, because it is a fair question about a book where the children are sent into space without a parent in sight, and the answer here is that the tone never leaves silly.
Where to get it
Ours is the revised paperback rather than the original 1990 printing, which is the copy you want, and it is $8.99 at The Magic School Bus Lost in the Solar System. Whichever copy ends up in your house, open the back half and count the planets before your child quotes it to anybody.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
A Beehive Is a City: The Magic School Bus Inside One
The Magic School Bus Inside a Beehive by Joanna Cole
Grade 2 to 5
Inside Your Own Eye: The Magic School Bus and the Senses
The Magic School Bus Explores the Senses by Joanna Cole
Grade 2 to 5
Ada Lace and the Impossible Mission: Scale and Sensors
Ada Lace and the Impossible Mission by Emily Calandrelli
Grade 2 to 5
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
