Dwarf Planets: Pluto, Charon, Ceres, and Eris

by Nancy Loewen, Jeff Yesh (Illustrator)

They're like major planets, but not quite. They circle around the sun. They're round. But they haven't cleared everything out of their path. Explore these unusual objects in this book about the dwarf planets.

Genres: Childrens, Science

24 pages, Library Binding

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Nancy Loewen grew up on a farm in southwestern Minnesota, surrounded by library books and cats. She's published more than 140 books for children. FOUR TO THE POLE (co-authored with polar explorer Ann Bancroft) and THE LAST DAY OF KINDERGARTEN were Minnesota Book Award finalists. Her WRITER'S TOOLBOX series received a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Association of Educational Publishers.

Nancy lives in Saint Paul and has an MFA in Creative Writing from Hamline University. She has two adult children and a cat who sometimes bites her knees under the table as she writes.

Reviews

[Kara]

It covers the basics of dwarf planets but needs to be updated to include Sedna.

[Julesmarie]

This review is for the whole series.

I bought this and two other series of children's books on planets to help teach my students how to do research during our astronomy unit. This was the middle of the three series in terms of how much I liked it. There are no actual pictures in this series, only illustrations. And while the illustrations are done well, I don't think anything can beat real images.

As for the factual information, there's not a lot here. Basics are covered, and one or two fun facts, but no real depth.