"Down By the Station"

Down By the Station

Written and illustrated by: Will Hillenbrand

Published by Harcourt Brance & Company in Orlando, FL in 1999

ISBN: 0-15-201804-2

Genre: Picture Book

Reading Level: Grade 1

Activity Level: Grades K, 1

Summary: This book is about a engine driver picking up many of the baby animals throughout the zoo and taking them on their way to the children's zoo. The children come to the zoo later that day on their field trip. This book introduces readers to many baby animals and is written as a song. The song accumulates new onomatopoeia words with the addition of each new animal on the train and eventually says "See the engine driver pull his little lever...Puff, puff, Toot, toot, Thrump, thrump, Peep, peep, Grump, grump, Mew, mew, Flip, flop, Bump, bump, Off we go!" (p. 28). Each of the words in the previous sentence is a collection of all the sounds the train makes and that each of the baby animals makes as each climbs onto the train.

Response: I choose to read this book because I remember this song from when I was little and I absolutely loved/love trains! Therefore, this was one children's book I could not pass without reading. I love the song element to this book because I think it makes it so much more fun to read and can really make children excited about literature!

I also like the illustrations in this book. I think that they are wonderful for young children since the colors definitely catch the eye and nearly every one is a double-page spread, which really moves the action along in the story. I love that at the far right of each illustration, the readers are given a hint as to where they are going to travel next in the zoo.

Teaching Connections: With kindergartners and first graders this would be a great book for the teacher to read to them to begin the day and get them excited about spending time at school.

Since this book's illustrations give hints as to where the train will travel next, it would be a good, to increase the children's thinking skills, to ask them what animal they think they will see next and see how many students pick up on this element of the book!

As a lesson, the teacher could have them choose an animal out of this book each day of the week she reads it and they could write, as a class, a story about what that animal saw that day when they children came to the zoo and what the animal might have been thinking, etc.

What Students Learn: From the book and activities, children have the opportunity to learn all kinds of things about different animals, especially from the story that they right, because anything they do not know, they must work together to search for and discover as a class. They also learn much about onomatopoeia words, even if they are yet to learn what they are called!

Image Retrieved From: http://www.storyplace.org/preschool/activities/bookcovers/downbythestation.jpg