On the Go Awesome
For young readers who are on the go, this book has it all. Cool trains, fun excavators, exciting airplanes, and more fill the pages, showing the many ways travel can occur. However, the author and illustrator take these vehicle voyages a step further by putting the reader in the driver’s seat. Trains are cool to watch and ride, but imagine being the conductor. Through illustration and imagination, the reader is in charge of getting travelers to their destinations. If you love travel, or love the vehicles that get you there, this book is your passport to awesome.
Pennsylvania Center for the Book Awards
Book Activities & Discussion Ideas
The sky is the limit when readers are on the go and awesome. Providing young children with materials such as blankets, chairs, large cardboard boxes, laundry baskets, or furniture cushions will prompt them to create their own vehicles and extend the story into creative play. Children will enjoy transitioning from observer to participant and can practice taking turns being the leader. When walking around their community, children can look for vehicles in action, on land, sea, or in the sky, and talk about where they think each might be going.
Adults can talk with children about the travel experiences they have had. What are the different ways they get from place to place? Have they traveled using any of the vehicles in the book? What other ways have they traveled to different places in their lives? Examples may include: a hay wagon, horse, three-wheeler, snowmobile, etc. Making personal connections to the story will support young readers’ understanding of the content. Which vehicle in the story would they most like to drive? Where would they go?