Construction Books

We’re reading Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and Jedrek loves it!  No surprise, since he is into all different vehicles, but especially construction.  Read my review of Mike Mulligan here.

Other construction books we’re reading are…

Get to Work, Trucks
By: Don Carter

This is an ideal book for even the youngest reader with the shortest attention span!  Simple text depicts a typical day of construction work.

“The loader lifts a big rock.
The dump truck drops a pile of little rocks.”

The copy we borrowed from our local library was clearly very well-loved.  I especially enjoyed studying the pictures; made with paint, foam board and plaster they are very unique!  A turtle rescued early in the story appears on all the later pages, hiding at the construction site.  I plan to create a similar art project inspired by these illustrations.

Roadwork!
By Sally Sutton

This book walks through the process of building a road… and I had no idea there were so many steps!  Twelve in all (plus a lunch break) from planning through clean up.  My son loved the onomatopoeia on each page, imitating the noises made by the trucks at various stages.

“Seal the road.  Seal the road.  Make it hot and squishy.  Spread the sticky tar and stones.  Sploshy! Splashy! Splishy!”

The illustrations are done in pigmented ink, which was a nice variation… I tend to pick a lot of watercolors.

Dig!
By: Andrea Zimmerman

Mr. Rally and his backhoe have 5 different jobs to do in just 1 day!  A little unbelievable, but we enjoyed reading about the different ways one machine can be used, depending on the worksite.  Jedrek even worked some simple subtraction on his own by keeping track as we read, “that’s 2 jobs, he has 3 more.”  He also caught on to the repeating phrases,

“Dig up rock and dig up clay!
Dig up dirt and dig all day!”

The ink and watercolor lines are simple enough that a child interested in art should be able to recreate the scenes in the book.  I found it especially encouraging that the book taught the lesson: work isn’t work if you enjoy it. :-)

Construction Zone
By: Tana Hoban

A simple book of color photographs with the name of the machine on each page.  I definitely underestimated how interested Jedrek would be.  Despite the lack of story line, he really enjoyed soaking in the details in all the pictures.  We were also introduced to a new machine: a tamper.

The Construction Alphabet Book
By: Jerry Pallotta

Jedrek likes to “help” me read any book, and this book makes it easy.  He reads the letter, and I read the words.  Beyond the basic “A is for apple,” this book introduced a number of construction vehicles that I had never heard of.  Each page gave enough detail on what the truck did to satiate his curiosity without boring him (or me).  Many pages also gave the sounds made by the vehicle, which we (and especially my 11-month-old) loved to repeat.

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