I always see my friends posting on Facebook looking for new books to read to their children, so when I run across ones that my little guy loves, I can’t help but pass them on! Here are a few that we’ve discovered over the last few months. Check these out at your local library, although, I will warn you…your little boys will love them so much that you may just need to purchase them for good!
1. How to Train a Train: written by Jason Carter Eaton & illustrated by John Rocco
Buy it on Amazon: Hardcover
Everything you need to know about finding, keeping, and training your very own pet train.
Finding advice on caring for a dog, a cat, a fish, even a dinosaur is easy. But what if somebody’s taste in pets runs to the more mechanical kind? What about those who like cogs and gears more than feathers and fur? People who prefer the call of a train whistle to the squeal of a guinea pig? Or maybe dream of a smudge of soot on their cheek, not slobber? In this spectacularly illustrated picture book, kids who love locomotives (and what kid doesn’t?) will discover where trains live, what they like to eat, and the best train tricks around—everything it takes to lay the tracks for a long and happy friendship. All aboard!
2. Digger Dumper Dozer: written by Hope Vestergaard & illustrated by David Slonim
Buy it on Amazon: Hardcover
Each truck and big machine in these enticing rhyming poems is different — and little readers are invited to find a vehicle that’s like them.
Sixteen boisterous, rhyming poems — each one highlighting the job and personality of a different vehicle, from a backhoe to an ambulance to a snowplow — invite young children to meet their favorite trucks face-to-face. Cheerful illustrations show each one in action, digging (or dozing, or dumping) away. Engaging visual details like an anxious turtle crossing the street just ahead of a steamroller are sure to keep preschoolers poring over the pages as they consider the question, “Trucks as far as eyes can see. . . . Which truck would you like to be?”
3. Otis and the Puppy: written and illustrated by Loren Long
Buy it on Amazon: Hardcover
Otis and his farm friends love to play hide-and-seek. Otis especially loves to be “It,” finding his friends as they hide. Yet when the newest addition to the farm—a bounding puppy who can’t sit still and has a habit of licking faces—tries to hide, he finds his attention wandering and is soon lost in the forest. Night falls and Otis, knowing his new friend is afraid of the dark, sets out to find him. There’s just one problem: Otis is also afraid of the dark. His friend is alone and in need, though, so Otis takes a deep breath, counts to ten, and sets off on a different game of hide-and-seek.
From the critically-acclaimed illustrator of The Little Engine that Could, Of Thee I Sing, and Otis, the 2013 Read for the Record selection.
