Books like Two Little Trains
By Margaret Wise Brown
Two Little Trains gets chanted, not just read, once your kid catches the puff puff puff and chug chug chug and starts saying it right along with you. Every page keeps that same rolling beat as the trains cross rivers and climb mountains heading West. If that rhythm is what hooks your kid, the books below carry it forward.
Same bouncy rhyme and love of vehicles, but If I Built a Car by Chris Van Dusen lets a kid dream up gadgets no real train could ever have.
A group of Maasai children sets out across the grasslands of Tanzania, counting animals from one to ten — a leopard, ostriches, giraffes — as they journey through the wild.
If your kid wants more trains after the last page, Clackety Track: Poems About Trains by Skila Brown lines up a whole yard of them in short, punchy poems.
That same singsong momentum, except Hooray for Fish by Lucy Cousins paddles through spotty, stripy, curly whirly fish instead of chugging west.
Zin! Zin! Zin! a Violin by Lloyd Moss has that same building momentum, one instrument joining the next the way the trains build speed heading west.
A young boy builds a whole traffic world out of everyday objects — records, shoe boxes, crayons, dandelions — and sends cars, helicopters, and fire engines zooming through it.
A family of four hops on and off a London bus for a day of sightseeing, visiting landmarks like Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, and the London Eye along the way.
A rhyming romp through everything that counts as a house — anthills, dog kennels, corn husks, pea pods — and eventually the surprising idea that a shoe, a mirror, even a word, might have a house too.
Same joyful chugging engine sounds, except in Rattletrap Car by Phyllis Root the family's beat-up car barely survives the trip to the lake.
A little girl's wish comes true when she and her baby brother set sail for a day aboard a ship called The Maggie B, just the two of them and the open sea.
Same journey-across-the-map feeling, but Señorita Mariposa by Ben Gundersheimer follows butterflies from Canada to Mexico in both English and Spanish.
Reach for Bats at the Ballgame by Brian Lies when the joy of two trains racing along needs a wilder, funnier crowd cheering it on.
