Children love clueless Bob and the aliens who ‘aren’t really there’. Bob is as silly as he looks and it is fun to play with the idea of a grown up with such an important job (keeping the moon clean and tidy and performing for space tourists) can be so oblivious to what we can see (as the adult, it’s fun to pretend you can’t see them too). This worked really well as a class text with year 1 children, lots of opportunities to explore inference and dramatic irony and both the story and the beautiful oil painting illustrations capture their imagination enough to provide a term’s worth of activities alongside topic exploration: This book is about the scientific discovery that changed the USA's production in the scientific and technological communities.

Like most kids from a young age I have always had an interest in space travel and astrology. However this is my first time reading about the missions and the individual pioneers who first traversed out of earths orbit 5 decades ago.

To develop a rich understanding of words associated with sadness

SPaG- there is some interesting vocabulary used in this book that might possibly be new to pupils in KS1, such as somersaults, souvenir, stilts, craters, astronauts. It also acts as a good lead on to talking about the difference between writing about yourself and writing from a different perspective. Pupils could write their own day in the life, either of themselves, or maybe someone else like is done in the book. Man on the moon (a day in the life of Bob) follows the life of Bob for the day as he goes about his day as an astronaut. It is set between earth and space and shows Bob’s transition between the two and has elements of real life in the sense of his morning and evening routine and some elements of fantasy such as tourist tours to the moon. Bob is known as the Man on the Moon and is the main character in this story, insight is given into the tasks he does on a daily basis such as “changing into his special man on the moon suit” and entertaining tourist spaceships. The book also briefly introduces two characters who are Bob’s friends; Billy the man on Mars and Sam the man on Saturn. Another fine account is Chaikin's re-telling of the landing pad fire aboard Apollo 1, which killed Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. It is one of the saddest moments in the history of the Apollo program, and Chaikin manages to strike a balance between respect for the fallen and the investigation that came to see the accident as a "failure of imagination." He avoids the temptation of the maudlin, and the three dead astronauts would undoubtedly have appreciated that. This tale starts off perfectly happy but once Pitch, the King of Nightmares, finds out that this boy has never had a nightmare he vows to make the boy his own and deem him the Prince of Nightmares. In the outcome of the battle the boy is left alone on the moon to be raised by the Moonbots, Moonmice and giant Glowworms who were also left behind. As he grows, he discovers the planet Earth through his father's telescope & realises that there are children on the far away planet that are much like him. As the children's lost balloons float up to him he finds that he can hear their hopes and dreams if he held them to his ear.

Creative writing- there are so many opportunities for creative writing tasks as a direct result of looking at this book. For example, writing postcards as if they were visiting the moon, writing tourist leaflets all about the moon (perhaps in collaboration with science lessons), writing Bob’s job description and then applying for that job etc.Have you ever wondered who or what lived on the moon? William Joyce's debut The Man in The Moon not only introduces to the jolly man who lives there (nope I'm not talking Santa Claus), he'll also tell you how he got there. We're huge fans of the moon in our home, and I can say for certainty that next time we're looking up at the moon, we'll all be looking for the wonderful man in the moon, the guardian of children.