Getting to the Bottom of It! Peek-A-Flap DIG! by Jay Garrett

AT A CONSTRUCTION SITE, DIFFERENT KINDS OF MACHINES HAVE DIFFERENT JOBS TO DO!

Kids and puppies love to dig, and Jaye Garett's Dig: Peek-a-Flap Board Book will make at least fifty percent of that bunch VERY happy.

This brightly illustrated board book offers a pair of sturdy lift-the-flap opportunities on each page which help the very youngest lovers of big diggers learn the names and jobs of their favorite construction machines.

Accompanied by colorful illustrations by Mattia Cerato, each one is revealed doing what they do best. Featured machines are the crane and wrecking ball, level, asphalt mixer and layer, front loader, excavators and power shovels, all with their own special flap and additional information for the older construction fanciers. Little fingers will love lifting the flaps as young readers learn to identify the machines inside.

A few run-throughs of this book and youngsters will be ready for a rhyming romp through Sherry Duskey Rinker's best-seller, Goodnight, Goodnight Construction Site and Rinker's diurnal cycle sequel, Mighty, Mighty Construction Site (see review here).

Dig and Delve: On the Construction Site by Carron Brown

For construction crazy kids, diggers on duty are the best sight on the building site!

In Carron Brown's newest addition to the Shine-A-Light series, On the Construction Site (Shine-A Light Books) (The Ivy Press, 2015) there's a special feature added to this study of heavy equipment involved building a skyscraper. Areas with a flashlight icon can be held up to a light to see what lies underneath the scene on the page: for example, what's inside the dump track headed away?

ROCKS AND RUBBLE!

Meanwhile diggers are revealed constructing the foundation, and whooshing cement mixers are shown squirting out the concrete footings, while concrete scrapers are waiting in the wings to do their thing, leveling the concrete so that it can dry nice and smooth.

Then here comes the crane operator, followed by iron workers, high steel workers, acetylene torch welders, and glaziers ready to put in the giant sheets of glass in those oh-so-high windows. And finally the less glamorous plumbers, flooring specialists, and electricians take over to finish up an apartment for the family just waiting to move in.

Author Carron Brown tells the whole story, with breaks to peer at just what's just under the surface, and Bee Johnson provides the stylized but realistic illustrations of equipment and workers as the skyscraper rises.  This one is non-fiction fun for youngsters who love heavy equipment, all identified in the appended picture dictionary.

Can We Build It? Builder Goose: by Boni Ashburn

HERE WE GO 'ROUND THE CONSTRUCTION SITE,
THE CONSTRUCTION SITE, THE CONSTRUCTION SITE...
...ON A SUNNY MONDAY MORNING!

Mother Goose may be busy looking for the muffin man, but Builder Goose is already hard at work down at the construction site, and he has an array of tools and vehicles at hand to help.

But then, all good little construction books have colorful pictures of dump trucks, steam shovels, and front loaders. Boni Ashburn's brand-new Builder Goose: It's Construction Rhyme Time! (Sterling, 2012) takes a new tack on the "Can We Build It?" theme. Ashburn has versified the construction process from preliminary plans to final cleanup with a charming re-write of Mother Goose's old-fashioned manuscript, coming up with wry little modern rhymes that get the job done with verve and bounce.

"SING A SONG OF GARBAGE.
A BUCKETFUL OF TRASH.
FOUR AND TWENTY LOADS OF IT,
READY TO BE MASHED!

Everything from wheelbarrows to heavy graders, excavators to an (itsy-bitsy) skid steer are celebrated in the rhyme scheme and meter of famous children's rhymes, familiar favorites from "This Old Man" (This Little Forklift,) as "Little Jack Horner (Little Jack Hammer) do their thing in the appealing primary-color illustrations of Sergio di Georgi, giving this new book for preschool construction fans a joyful day on the job site. Pair this one with Sherri Rinker's dynamic new best-seller, Goodnight, Goodnight Construction Site, (see my review here) for a skyscraper of a storytime!

Size Matters: Heavy Equipment Up Close by Andra Serlin Abramson

Among Sterling Publishing's giant-sized entries in their eye-popping Up Close series is their Heavy Equipment UP CLOSE (Up Close (Sterling Hardcover)), which will thrill fans of BIG machines everywhere.

How BIG are they? There are the space shuttle's eleven-million-pound Crawler, which moves the shuttles along at the dazzling speed of two miles per hour, and its Vehicle Assembly Building where the spacecraft are stored, so big that clouds actually form inside beneath the roof!

Or how about giant oil rigs, 1000 feet tall, which house 300 workers as they chew their way five miles down below the ocean bottom? A 15-ton tree harvester that can cut, strip limbs, and debark a large tree in less than 30 seconds? What about the business end of the "boring machines" which dug the English Channel tunnel (nicknamed the "Chunnel")?

These and many other mechanical marvels--pavers, crawler cranes, farm combines, and super dozers--are all here, in full color and detail. One, the "marvelous mining machine," is pictured in a double gatefold which opens to a panoramic photo of four pages totalling almost 42 inches wide. Even the dust jacket can be flipped to reveal a BIG wall-sized poster.

Sterling's oversized books are themselves a wonder of engineering, with gatefolds and actual size up-close photos of sculptural beauty. Kids who can't get enough of the wonders of vehicles will find this combination of remarkable illustrations and informative text captivating. Eye-catching text boxes are filled with fascinating facts--e.g., "A baling press can take a bulky metal object, such as a car, and compress it from all sides until it resembles a giant metal block." (Top that, Wall-E!)

ALA's Booklist gave this book one of its coveted "starred reviews," rare for children's nonfiction, and called it a "terrific mix of fun technical vocabulary and trivia ripe for sharing."

New entries in this supersized series include Submarines UP CLOSE (Up Close (Sterling Hardcover)), Fire Engines UP CLOSE (Up Close (Sterling Hardcover)), and Fighter Planes UP CLOSE (Up Close (Sterling Hardcover)).