By Gail Gibbons
The book that fixes the thing half the class believes, that summer means the Earth is closer to the sun, and shows them with one clear picture that it's the tilt.
Gail Gibbons walks a child through the year with the Earth tilted on its axis, circling the sun. When your half of the planet leans toward the sun, the light hits it straight on, the days are long, and it's summer. When it leans away, the same sunlight spreads thin and it's winter. She lays in the solstices and the equinoxes, and shows what each season looks like from the equator all the way to the poles. The diagrams are clean and labeled, the same Earth drawn leaning one way and then the other, so the cause is right there on the page to point at.
The closer-to-the-sun idea is stubborn because it feels right, closer things are warmer, and a child, and plenty of grown-ups, will hold it until something replaces it. A sentence won't do it. A picture will, and Gibbons gives the picture: the same Earth at the same distance, tilted toward the sun in one drawing and away in the next. A child can hold that image and re-explain it, which is how you know the correction took. The updated edition also brings in the solstices and equinoxes, so it covers the whole year rather than just the two easy seasons.