Five Little Men in a Flying Saucer by Dan Crisp (Child's Play) - five little men come to visit Earth from Outer Space, but finding it spoiled and neglected, they fly away, one by one. Luckily, by the end of this much-loved counting song, the world becomes a much better place to visit. Die-cut windows reveal glimpses of what spacemen observe as they fly around the world.
Roaring Rockets by Tony Mitten (Kingfisher Books) - a trio of animal astronauts invite children to come on a trip to the moon. A simple explanation of how space rockets work, where they travel, and what they do, with great rhyming couplets and bold illustrations.
Published last October, We're Off to Look for Aliens (Walker Books) sees Colin McNaughton return to a favourite theme. Dad's new book has just arrived and the children are sitting down to read his latest adventure. Blasting off into space, Dad's on the hunt for aliens. He meets lots of them and, strangest of all, he falls in love. Dad brings his alien woman back to Earth, where they have a family and live happily ever after. When Dad's book is finished, the family are amused ... because it's an extra-terrestrial, extra-true story - all about them!
Although published a decade ago, Colin McNaughton's earlier venture into space, Here Come the Aliens (Walker Books), remains a favourite. It tells of a fleet of spaceships, full of fearsome creatures, heading towards Earth, and they've only got one thing in their simple brains: to conquer the human race.
Q Pootle 5 by Nick Butterworth (Picture Lions) - little alien Q Pootle 5 is on his way to a moon party when his rocket falls to Earth in need of repairs. It wants a new rocket booster, but where will he find one? Perhaps Colin the Cat might be able to help - when he's finished his dinner, that is.
Butterworth's little alien returns in Q Pootle 5 in Space (Harper Collins) - a high-speed space-chase unfolds as Q Pootle 5 and his friend flee from hungry monsters and seek temporary refuge on Planet Dave - who, feeling lonely, wishes he was a bigger planet, with moons to dance with. A solution to Dave's problems emerges when, encountering the monsters for a second time, Q Pootle 5 and Oopsy pump them up with air, attach strings and take them to Dave. Monsters may not be quite as good as moons but he might be able to teach them to dance.
Oh, No! Where Are My Pants? and Other Disasters: Poems written by Lee Bennett Hopkins and illustrated by Wolf Erlbruch - 15 poems about various bad days, such as friends-moving-away days and forgetting-your-pants days!
You can never have enough pants, so following on from their popular Pants, Giles Andreae and Nick Sharratt (Corgi Books) again teamed up to create More Pants - a second unashamedly silly celebration of 'smalls'. Both combine Andreae's rhyming text and Sharratt's vibrant images to brilliant effect. The Pants collection includes frilly, jewel-encrusted, psychedelic and 'lighting-up-at-night' pants, while More Pants includes a limousine and a dinosaur in pants.
