ALL ABOARD! THE AIRPORT TRAIN

There’s so much to see on the airport train.

One of the passengers on the airport train has lost her ticket! In this lift-the-flap concertina book, readers travel from car to car of the aforementioned train, searching for both the missing ticket and for other objects hidden within the pictures. Each illustration requires a different preschool skill, including recognizing shapes, counting, and matching. The images feature diverse humans and quirky creatures, not to mention skillfully drawn, child-friendly objects such as instruments and balls. The clean design separates the text from the illustrations, which are busy and teeming with life. Once they have completed the activities within the train cars, readers can flip to the backs of the pages to see what passengers are viewing out of the windows and to do more counting and identification. The pages of the book pull out into a full train, and it lacks any kind of narrative throughline, making it unwieldy for group read-alouds. It is, however, a wonderful option for one-on-one learning sessions and for children who are independent enough to manipulate the pages on their own—although it should be noted that the design, while clever, can be confusing and, at times, frustrating for the youngest readers.

A fun and useful educational tool for preschoolers, particularly beginning readers. (Board book. 4-6)