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Resource 3 Kerrod, R. (2000). //The Solar System//. United States of America: Graham Beehag Books.

**__Description of resource:__** This book ‘The Solar System’ by Robin Kerrod introduces the solar system, its planets, moons, asteroids and comets, and its explorations. Students travel back in time to when the solar system was born from a huge swirling of cloud of gas and dust. They will learn about hot rocky planets and huge gas giants, and crater covered moons and spectacular comets. This book is a very detailed factual book with helpful visual images to accompany the text.

__**Rationale:**__ **Relevance to the outcome:** This resource is relevant to the stated outcome as students are able to learn about and understand some of the features of the solar system when examining this book. It is a great learning tool for students as it allows them to gain an understanding of some of the basic and more complex features of the solar system in easy to understand language that is appropriate to Stage 2 level. It describes every aspect of the solar system in detail and provides realistic images to help with the accompanying text. This therefore makes the book an engaging and relevant resource to use when studying this unit. Additionally, the book uses appropriate scientific metalanguage for objects in outer space and provides a glossary of words at the end of the book to assist students with the understanding of some of the scientific words related to the solar system such as asteroids, meteoroids, comets, nebulae and many more. Skamp (1998) argues that students can use books to help them acquire interesting facts and understanding about the planets that they are interested in and want to find more about, hence this book provides thorough information about each planet and compares them (p. 368). Moreover, the book uses full colour photographs and drawings that have been carefully selected by reinforcing the scientific principles and concepts described. These images acts as stimulus in encouraging whole class discussion on students’ thoughts and ideas about the images and how it assists them in their understanding of the outer space (Skamp, 1998, p. 376). **Aspect of literacy:** Students will use the modelled factual descriptions on the book (pages 5-9) to shape an understanding of the appropriate conventions needed for the construction of a factual description text. Fundamental to a factual description is the consistent use of its grammatical features. Such features include the use of particular nouns to describe features or characteristics, the use of different types of adjectives to form complex noun groups, use of relating verbs to define, describe and classify and use of action verbs to describe activities and behaviours (Droga & Humphry, 2003, p. 133). Students will come to understand the purpose of using such grammatical features in the context of the factual description text presented. This understanding is crucial as the students will construct their own written text in the next lesson using grammatical features characteristic to this particular text type. As stated above, students can use this resource as a guide on how to correctly structure a factual description. The way in which students can access this information is through the process of reading, which requires them to use the four roles that are involved in the decoding of text; these include the code breaker, text participant, text user and text analyst. The unit of work on the solar system introduces students to new vocabulary that is not regularly used, therefore students will often be required to decode (read and hear) and encode (write and speak) about these terms and symbols that are specific to the topic or have specific meaning in this context (Santoro, 2004, p. 54). Teachers should have an awareness of the knowledge and experiences children draw upon when comprehending text, which is known as the text participant role (Santoro, 2004, p. 55). This role is developed through the text as students learn to organise and clarify the provided information, thus beginning to develop their comprehension of the correct structure and features included in a factual description. These roles help students to become fluent text users who are able to produce and use texts for particular contexts and produce new knowledge, which is extended through their understanding of liguistic structures and features of written texts. The final role used in the comprehension of texts is the text analyst which involves students' recognition of texts as having positions and the power to influence readers (Santoro, 2004, pp. 57-58). This last role is represented clearly in the resource as students learn to recognise the place of Earth in the solar system. By developing these four roles, students can use their knowledge in creating their own factual description on the planets.