Tuesday Storytime: Cars and Trucks

I was on vacation this week, so I left a nice simple bouncy storytime program for my replacement to run.  I always feel so bad when I miss, partly because I really enjoy storytime and seeing the kids every week, but also because I feel honor-bound to leave a good program behind, so it often has really good stories that I wish I were reading myself!

Big Truck and Little Truck
Jan Carr, illustrated by Ivan Bates
ISBN: 0439071771
Dreamy pastel-bright watercolors of a little truck stretching to meet the requirements of a big-truck job.

Big Truck has been teaching Little Truck for a long time, and they do all the jobs together: go to the market, pull things out of ditches, haul veggies and compost, and everything else needed on the farm.  But when Big Truck has to go to the shop for a while, can Little Truck manage everything alone for the first time?  Sweet, satisfying, and re-assuring, all while being "trucky" enough for the most die-hard enthusiast.


Calling All Cars (boardbook)
Sue Fliess, illustrated by Sarah Beise
ISBN: 9781492638360
Bright poppy "modern" cartoon illustrations of all sorts of cars.

This is like a modern-day short version of a Richard Scarry's "Things that Go" sort of book.  It's cute and quick and fun, and very modern (in the "wow this is really going to be dated in a couple dozen years" sort of way) in the artistic sense. The narrative roughly follows the course of a day, but it really is just a rhyme as an excuse to illustrate a whole lot of cars and trucks.


Zoom! Zoom! Sounds of things that go in the city
Robert Burleigh, illustrated by Ted Carpenter
ISBN: 9781442483156
Retro-pop illustrations in quad-tones (blue, red, yellow, black) and a fun swinging rhyme structure.

Catchy rhymes, cute retro cityscapes and cars, and a fun lighthearted set of rhymes, with onomatopoeic highlight words on each spread.  Each one has the focus on a different type of cityscape: a morning scene with trash trucks and busses, a highway under construction, a metro train, ambulances, ice-cream trucks... This one does have non-cars: bicycles, joggers, skateboards, etc, but it's still very vehicle-oriented, so I kept it, just because it's so pretty and fun.

  

New Arrivals: Picture Book: Work, Dogs, Work! by James Horvath

Work, Dogs, Work: A Highway Tail
James Horvath
ISBN: 9780062189707
"sequel" to Dig, Dogs, Dig and Build, Dogs, Build

Another Horvath added to the collection - this one is a road-work book, and I have to say I'm not as happy with it as I am the other two.  This one doesn't spend as much time emphasizing the importance of planning and engineering, and even implies that the crew doesn't realize they need to build a tunnel and suspension bridge until after they start working.

Sad that I didn't like it as much, but that doesn't mean it's bad.  It should work well as a "roadwork" or "machines at work" storytime book, just isn't going to become one of my favorites.