Outer Space Bedtime Race

Rob Sanders' Outer Space Bedtime Race is a rhyming bedtime book for 5 year olds in which the whole solar system turns in at once.

What happens

On Earth the children call good night and pull their covers up tight. Then the book heads off into space, because the aliens need sleep as well.

It turns into a race. Every planet has the same jobs your reader has. Wash, pyjamas, bed.

They just go about them a bit differently.

The Mercury kids land their rocket ships and hurry off to a bubble bath in a steamy crater. On Venus the night drags on for days, so the kids climb into suits made for deep sleep and slurp warm Galactic Goop by the scoop. The Martians scrub until their skin gleams green, then comb their tangled, star-filled hair.

The Saturn kids rest their heads on clouds of fluff (and sleep in the buff, which always gets a reaction). The Neptunites have to sleep in crowds. The Pluto kids sleep on their feet, lined up nice and neat, and that is where the book breaks the news that poor Pluto isn't a planet after all.

Expect a conversation about that one. Possibly a long conversation, at exactly the wrong moment.

It's rhyming couplets the whole way through, two lines at a time, so this is a book for reading out loud. Click-CLICK go the chamber lids on Mercury. The sounds do most of the work and your reader will be joining in by about the fourth time.

It's very short. A few hundred words of verse, and it stops where you want a bedtime book to stop. The aliens are all asleep, the race is over, and it's your sleepyhead's turn next.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Worth knowing this is an American edition, so one or two spellings look odd if you're reading every word exactly as it's printed.

What to read next

If the bedtime routine is the part that goes down well, try How to Put an Octopus to Bed. Little Floyd has decided that tonight HE is putting his mum and dad to bed, starting with the bath, and eight arms in one tub goes about as well as you'd expect.