Books like If I Built a Car
By Chris Van Dusen
For the kid who's already redesigning the family car from the back seat, this is the daydream fully built and put on the road. Bright, zippy, and gadget-happy, with the swagger of a classic car commercial.
A little boy turns his living room into a bustling traffic world, using records as rotaries, shoe boxes as highway ramps, and crayons as lane markers to make his cars stop and go.
A boy walks home from school and imagines wilder and wilder sights on Mulberry Street, building a story fantastic enough to tell his father.
A collection of poems rides the rails through every kind of train imaginable — bullet, sleeper, underground, zoo — celebrating the sound, speed, and grit of train travel one poem at a time.
An imaginative boy dreams up the ultimate house, sketching in a racetrack, a flying playroom, and a gigantic slide as his ideas grow wilder with every rhyme.
A team of kid inventors heads to the zoo armed with zany traps and rhyming plans, determined to outsmart and catch the rainbow-maned unicorn.
A collection of poems imagines a curious inn run by poet William Blake, where dragons, angels, and a Man in the Moon all check in for the night.
An endlessly imaginative girl transforms into robots, trees, and countless other characters through rhyming games, while her messy room and her mother's patience wait in the background.
A family of kids and babies fills the house with jazz — humming, drumming, tapping piano keys, and swaying to a beat that carries them all the way to sleep.
A spirited girl claims the giant box from a new refrigerator and turns it into a castle, a clubhouse, and countless other creations, sharing every adventure with her neighbor Fats Watson.
A bright, rhyming romp through a day in the life of birds — from the rooster's dawn crow to the owl's nighttime call — inviting little ones to cheep and tweet along.
A young Chinese American girl notices color everywhere in her everyday world, from red dragons and firecrackers to lychees, and brown in her own teddy bear.
A family piles into a rattletrap car that won't go fast and won't go far, and must fix each breakdown along the bumpy road to a cool, cool lake.
