(Tardy) Toddler Tuesday #1

(All books read on January 20th)
Moo in the Morning
By Barbara Maitland and Andrew Kulman

Fox in Socks
By Dr. Seuss

All Aboard the Dinotrain
By Deb Lund and Howard Fine

Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You?
By Dr. Seuss

Marvin K. Mooney, Will You Please Go Now?
By Dr. Seuss

Hugo the Flying Firefighter
By Lorette Boekstra

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Moo in the Morning was a choice that evolved out of my toddler-aged children’s interest in farms. The book is sweet and disarming, talking about a mom who thinks the city is too noisy. She takes the children to visit their uncle on the “quiet” farm. They soon discover the farm is nowhere near as quiet as you’d think.

This book caught me because I have lived in both rural and urban areas. I spent up to about age 9 on a farm 20 miles outside of town. For a while, we didn’t have running water. We went to the well and hauled buckets back. Bath water was on the heated stove. I hauled wood (don’t know how much help younger me actually was) and stacked wood for the stove in the basement. Planting, weeding and harvesting our own food was part of my life, as was watching my mom can and preserve food.

Then I moved into a little town, maybe 100 people total, that was closer to Town. Then around my 30th birthday, I moved to Portland, where I’ve gotten a good taste of the “noisy city.” I love both places, and a book that celebrates town and country is well worth reading.

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My room is full of almost preschool-aged kids, all of whom have been nutty for dinosaurs for quite a while. And honestly, the sight (and sound) of a three-year-old looking at a book and shrieking “TRICERATOPS!!!” will never fail to give me a grin. As a long-time dinosaur nerd (love to Michael Crichton and Jurassic Park) I love that the children have glommed onto them, too. I wonder how much of it is the anecdotal idea that kids love dinosaurs at this age because they could STOMP THEIR PARENTS.

Anyways, we’ve read a lot about the “terrible lizards,” both fiction and nonfiction. The first fiction that captured our twin obsessions with dinosaurs and trains was called Dinosaur Train, by John Steven Gurney. Surprisingly enough, it has no relation to this Tuesday’s tale.

In Dinosaur Train, a young boy named Jesse is in love with dinosaurs and trains. He draws both incessantly. One day, the drawings come to life! He goes on adventures with the dinosaurs and ends up safe in his room.

I read this book probably ten times a day for several months. I started to dread seeing the book. However, I know a big part of developing literacy is repitition, so I’d read it again. And again. And again.

Until one day, the kids started acting out the book. We used our lunch table benches as trains. The kids straddled the benches. Someone would shriek, “There’s a volcano!” Everyone would lean that direction, then tumble to the floor, emulating the derailment of the train in the story. Then they’d choose someone to be the dinosaur that rights the train.

It’s amazing how “Let’s pretend” can make anything palatable again! I did my own share of “Pretend” growing up, with paper bag armor and an ice cream bucket helmet, leading armies around my living room.

So I didn’t mind Dinosaur Train so much after that, and it stoked (heh) our interested in All Aboard the Dinotrain. This book traces a surprising and mildly perilous train journey for a group of dinosaurs.

My kids latched onto this book, too. It swiftly became part of our play. The most fun thing about this book, though, is how well O. remembers it. He listened to us read it several times and had already memorized about half of it. Now he has probably 95 percent of the book memorized.

I don’t even have to read it anymore. I invite him to “read” it to his friends. He’ll sit, book nearly as big as him in his lap, paging through and reciting it to his friends. They hang on to his every word.

It’s awesome.

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Dr. Seuss’s books have been an integral part of my class’s journey toward literacy. We’ve kept them on hand in various age-appropriate levels for at least a year. Nearly every teacher at my school that I’ve talked to has cited Dr. Seuss as part of their own journey toward loving words.

My own journey is no different. McElligott’s Pool  is a particularly strong memory of mine. It doesn’t seem to be one of the most well-known of Seuss’s books. My grandma, a former English teacher, had a big stockpile of books in her TV room. I used to curl up in her dark wood Morris chair and read about this man’s certainty that there could be fish of all shapes and sizes in the pool. I fell in love with the art (an early edition) and that magical rhythm Seuss coaxed from words had me hooked right away.