Tuesday Storytime: Travel

This week's theme is entirely due to finding Miss Mouse Takes Off in the delivery one day by chance and loving it.

Miss Mouse Takes Off
Jan Ormerod
ISBN: 0688178715

Miss Mouse is a long-armed, long-legged stuffed mouse, and she engagingly narrates her airplane trip to visit Grandma, from check-in through the in-flight movie and back to the ground again.  I love this so much because it's entirely factual, and doesn't over-glamorize or add fantastic or fantasy touches to the trip - it just stands on it's own as a mundane real life adventure.



Rattle and Rap
Susan Stegall
ISBN: 9781845077037

This one is super super short.  Excellent choice for today, because I had a bunch of wiggle-worms.  This might be better as a one-on-one book, because the illustrations are hugely detailed and interesting, but the word-count is so low that I'm not able to linger on them as much as I'd like because I have to keep the story (such as it is) flowing along.  Essentially this is just an onomatopoeic journey on a train ride, from start "Tickets please, tickets please" to stop "End of the line, end of the line" with lots of train noises in between "rattle and rap" and "whistle and whine" and some basic descriptions "hurrying, hurrying, hurtling by" "skimming the sky, skimming the sky."  Notable also for casual inclusion of multi-ethnic, multi-able characters.


Bear on a Bike
Stella Blackstone
Debbie Harter
ISBN: (Board Book) 9781841483757

There is supposed to be a hardcover edition of this, but I wasn't able to find one through our consortium, sadly.  (Hardcover ISBN: 978190122491)  A rhyming book, with paired page-spreads - one with the bear on a form of transport (bike, raft, boat, rocket), the second spread shows where the bear went.  Ends with Bear on a rocket-ship heading out into space.  Very sweet, very short.  The rhymes are easy, but some of them don't scan particularly well for me: "I'm going to the seaside, / Where children love to play, / Where young friends dig and race / And swim, while fishes dart away."  

Overall a nice set of short easy reads for our little ones today.