Tuesday 24 September 2013

#ReadItMD13 Theme Week - "Toot Toot Beep Beep vehicles a plenty" - Let's take to the air!

"Zephyr Takes Flight" by Steve Light. The sort of female flying hero we utterly adore!
Today we're taking flight, up to the highest height as we continue with our #ReadItMD13 theme week. We're taking a look at vehicles, whether they roll on land, fly through the air or skim through the sea (or under it!)

It's all about the planes today though, and we'll start off by looking at a former book of the week...

"Zephyr Takes Flight" by Steve Light. Pioneering piloting!
In "Zephyr Takes Flight" A young girl called Zephyr loves aeroplanes more than anything else in the world. When she's not collecting books and posters about them, she's making aeroplane models. One day she discovers a hidden room in her house filled to the brim with aeroplane plans and huge full scale planes to fly, and takes off on a flight of fancy to a far off land. Here, pigs fly - all except one poor little mite who hasn't earned his wings yet. Can Zephyr help?

It's a wonderful book, full of brilliant positive messages, fabulous planes of course, and one of the most engaging and charming female characters to grace a children's book in a long time. Perfect for your mini Amy Johnsons!

We're ramping up the pace for our next flight book - and we're not leaving the piggies behind just yet either...

"Pigs Might Fly" by Jonathan Emmett and Steve Cox. Supersonic!
Imagine an alternate universe where the three little pigs didn't mess around with building houses, but decided to take to the skies for an air race supreme. Of course, you can't have a three little pigs tale without a hungry wolf so mix all those ingredients together, fire up your jet engines and take a look at "Pigs Might Fly" by Jonathan Emmett and Steve Cox. It's a high octane thrilling book as we see each pig building their aircraft then attempting to outwit that gnarly wolf in his fighter jet at the end. We absolutely loved this book!

Once again we can't have any vehicle round-ups without consulting "The master" so...

"A Day At The Airport" by Richard Scarry. Busy busy Bratwursts!
Richard Scarry's "A Day at the Airport" has consistently been one of Charlotte's favourite books and it's one of the first Richard Scarry books I bought her rather than passing them down to her. Here we meet old friends Huckle, Sally and Lowly as they enjoy a fun-packed day with Rudolf Von Flugel, air ace and owner of the coolest zeppelin on the planet - the infamous "Bratwurst Balloon" - He's even got an aeroplane car that seems to spend its entire time driving backwards, how cool is that? 

Like all Scarry books, it's chock full of detail and we love the running threads through the story (watch out for the piggy chasing his hat throughout the entire thing, wonderful!) 

A fantastic book if your little ones get excited about airports (sad that they'll grow out of that when they get to our age, eh?)

So that's it for our roundup in the skies - do you have any more aeroplane-based recommendations? If so, drop a comment in the box below or tweet at us @readitdaddy, we'd love to add them to our list!