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Little Blue Truck Book

The Little Blue Truck book is one of our granddaughter's favorites! It's a wonderful tool to teach friendship and kindness. It flows with both rhythm of rhyme and uses wonderful "sound" words which in school you may remember as examples of onomatopoeia.  It offers so much more than a few minutes of reading - which in and of itself is extremely valuable to a child. 

Little Blue truck Book Summary

Little Blue Truck is very kind and therefore has many farm animal friends willing to help him.  When a big yellow dump truck comes along and gets stuck, he learns the importance of both kindness and friendship.

lessons found in the Little Blue Truck Book:

Here are a few things to add to your reading time to enhance your child's development.  I am not suggesting doing all these at one time nor making this wonderfully fun book into a text book! 

The joy of sitting with you reading a book together is the most important aspect of reading with a child.  These are just a few "add-ons" along the way to help your child grow.

As your child grows, this Little Blue Truck book can grow with them!

  • Friendship - Use this little book to talk about the importance of friendship.  Before Little Blue Truck, Dump was on his own with no friends.  Friends help each other as we see from Little Blue Truck's friends.
  • Kindness - Little Blue Truck can be a great example of kindness and a spring board to talk to your child about this important trait.  Kindness takes the feelings of others into consideration.  Kindness thinks of others before thinking of oneself.  
  • Both kindness and helping others are two tools to making friends.  Sometimes we have to be the one to reach out first.
  • Self-image - Even with just about all the animals helping push Little Blue and Dump, it took the smallest animal of all to finally push them out.  Talk about even though we may not be the biggest or the best at an activity, we can still do our best and help out like Toad.
  • Hurt - Dump was rude and probably hurt the other characters' feelings as he sped by.  Hurt feelings happen, but it is our choice of what we will do with them.  Little Blue Truck and the animals didn't hold a grudge when Dump needed help.  They let go of their hurt and in the end gained a new friend.
  • Scared - The text talks about Dump sounding scared after getting stuck and no one else heard.  Talk about how even "big people" get scared and feel alone like Dump.  Discuss some things that help you when you are afraid.

Connecting these for a Bible Lesson

Both kindness and friendship are mentioned often in the Bible.  Here are a few Bible verses that connect well with the story in Little Blue Truck book:

Kindness:

  • Kindness is a fruit of the Holy Spirit.  Galatians 5:22
  • "Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you." - Ephesians 4:32
  • Parable of the Good Samaritan is a wonderful place to connect with the story of the Little Blue Truck book.

Friendship:

  • "Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor. If either of them falls down, one can help the other up. But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up."  Ecclesiastes 4:9-10
  • "Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing." 1 Thessalonians 5-11

Enhance Reading & Growth

Rhythm - Science has shown us that both the rhythm of reading and the sound of your voice impacts a child's brain development as well as laying neural pathway foundations for reading.  

Rhyme - As children become aware of rhyming sounds, it boosts brain activity and prepares them for early literacy skills.

Repetition - The repetitiveness of text is like waving a flag to a baby or toddler saying they've heard this before...listen carefully.

What to do:

  • Read the Little Blue Truck book to yourself a few times first to get a natural flow of rhythm.
  • Don't just read the "sounds," make them.  Change your voice to a high "Beep!" or a low "Croak!", and occasionally point to these words to help your little one connect the squiggly lines on the page that make up words with the sounds you are making.
  • As your child gets older, pause and let them say the sound words that are repeated throughout the book.  Change the text if you need to and read "A piggy said..." instead of "Oink said a piggy." allowing your child to fill in the animal sound as if he were reading.

For Toddlers & Preschoolers:

  1. Use this Little Blue Truck book to introduce & learn several animal sounds. When reading one of the animal sounds, point to that animal in the illustrations.
  2. Use the colors in the book along with the color words.  Little Blue is of course blue.  It also talks about green toad.  Name the colors of the other animals and Dump.  Ask your child what colors they see on each page. The colors blue and green are repeated. Point out other things that are these colors.
  3. When the animals get ready to push, they count 'One, Two, Three'.  Help your child count a few things.
  4. Talk about what is happening in the illustrations and how the characters appear to be feeling.  Let the book spark even more vocabulary as you talk to your child.

Reading Skills:

  1. Sight Words - Out of the over 300 words in this book, almost 80% are what we call sight words from the Dolch List.  These are words that don't follow the rules of pronunciation.  Children begin learning these as early ad preschool and into Kindergarten through Third Grade.  Allow your child to begin reading these along with you at an early age.  Words such as "a", "the", "said", "you", etc. are repeated quite often throughout the book.
  2. Rhyming - Little Blue Truck book is written with a rhyming pattern like a poem.  Allow your child to chime in with the next rhyming word such as - "Toad said, "Croak!" and winked an eye when Little Blue Truck went rolling _____."
  3. Phoneme Awareness - Sound out some of the large text words letter by letter and pointing to letters such as in "Beep."  Connect the name of the letter with the sound. Point to the B and call it's name and sound; repeat with the e and p.  Helping a child associate the written letter with the sound heard sets a wonderful foundation from reading.
  4. Point out repeated phonetic patterns such as: "ee" in beep, green & sheep,

More great Children's books with lessons like Little Blue Truck Book. 

Also, this Little Blue Truck book may be purchased through our affiliate link with Christianbook.com below - 

211787: Little Blue Truck (padded board book) Little Blue Truck (padded board book)
By Alice Schertle & Jill McElmurry / Young Readers Franchise

Little Blue Truck is a joyful cacophony of animal and truck sounds that will have youngsters beeping and quacking---and begging for one more go-round! Along the way, readers see that it pays to be kind to our animal friends, if we show a friendly respect to others, we're more likely to get help when we're, say, stuck in the muck in a truck. Padded board book edition.

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