Friendship and More with Little Blue Truck

Confession: Before I had C, I literally knew NOTHING about little boys. Sure, I’d worked with 75% boys being a SLP in schools for 5 years, but I knew nothing really about parenting little boys. Two of my worries included How would I teach a little boy to be a nice person and What type of quality literature was written for little boys (my mom is a reading specialist, so quality literature is important….and you never truly understand the importance of quality literature until you’re asked to read Happy Troll-o-ween! (DreamWorks Trolls) (Pictureback(R)) on repeat for a week, just a side note). At my first shower, one of my oldest friends gave me Little Blue Truck board book. I read it once and fell in love. It’s one of C’s favorites, too, with the sweet truck and lots of fun farm animals. Luckily for us, there’s a whole series of Little Blue Truck  books now! Each book has a sweet theme, teaches social skills and packs in lots of early speech/language skills, too!

Little Blue Truck,  the original, is a sweet book that teaches about the golden rule and the importance of
friendships. Little Blue is kind to all of the farm animals, while the dump truck that drives through town
simple doesn’t have time… until he’s stuck in the mud and needs some help getting out!

This book is great for targeting animal sounds (even the littlest of kids love to imitate them and they are
great for working on early developing speech sounds like m, p, b), identifying various farm animals,
showing early cause and effect skills and teaching what friendship means!

Little Blue Truck Leads the Way is the cute sequel that teaches about the importance of taking turns
and slowing down. Our small town truck, Little Blue, goes into the city one day and finds himself in the
midst of a traffic jam. He is able to solve the problem by teaching the other cars that “one at a time is
the way to go” (I wish Little Blue could come teach us that lesson on I-75 or the Tollway!!!)

This book is great for kids who like different things that go, as it talks about a bus, street sweeper,
limousine and more! It also talks about the importance of slowing down (something we all struggle with
in today’s world, I believe) and taking turns.

Last weekend, C saw this book from across the store and ran to get it! It was the only one we have
been missing from our collection. In Little Blue Truck’s Springtime, Spring has sprung and Little Blue
and the toad have fun driving around to see all of the new baby animals that have been born!

This story is great to introduce counting, introduce vocabulary for babies and mommies (pig and piglet,
duck and duckling, etc), work on animal noises (What does the cow say?) and where questions (Where
does a duck live?). I can already tell that this is going to be a favorite this spring at my house!

Little Blue Truck’s Christmas is a favorite because of the fun surprise at the end! :) It’s a great book to
target counting 1-5 and early qualitative concepts such as tall, short, thin, thick, etc.

Finally, my little Halloween loving boy’s favorite, Little Blue Truck’s Halloween! This book has fun flaps. It can be used as a guessing game for older kids, as Little Blue describes his friend’s and their costumes (then you lift the flap to see who is dressed in each costume). It’s also great to model the thinking for inferencing (I see pink ears and skin...I know that a farm animal that is pink is a pig, so I guess that the pig is dressed up as a witch).

I hope that you and your family love the Little Blue Truck books as much as we do! What other book series do you and your kids love?