Read Dinosaur Train – Little Golden Book Favorites free in the Little Reads app.
Andrea Posner-Sanchez's Dinosaur Train - Little Golden Book Favorites is a gentle dinosaur treat for 5 year olds, with three short stories and a whole lot of fish.
Buddy lives with the Pteranodon family. His brother Don and his sisters Tiny and Shiny love fish so much they've made up a song about it. Buddy isn't so sure (does anyone ever get a little bit tired of fish?).
In the first story the family has guests for lunch. Tank the Triceratops only eats plants, and Shiny's big fish surprise doesn't go down well. At all! It's a lovely, simple way into the difference between plant eaters and meat eaters, all through beaks and teeth and what tastes nice.
The second story is a birthday outing. Dad has tickets to a concert at Corythosaurus Canyon, where the dinosaurs make music by hooting through the crests on their heads. There's a game of hide-and-hoot too, which is exactly the kind of thing your reader will want to try at home.
In the third, Buddy and Tiny fall out over what a Stegosaurus uses its tail spikes for. So they go and ask their friend Morris. When they get there, Morris and Alvin the Allosaurus are having a row of their own over a gully.
Each story is short enough for one sitting. They all run on the Dinosaur Train, with Mr Conductor popping up with a picture or a helpful answer. If there's one message running through the book, it's that asking questions is how you find things out.
What makes it work for this age is that the facts come wrapped up in family stuff. Siblings bickering. A new friend who eats a whole bush in one go. A little Corythosaurus who's nervous before her solo. The dinosaur names are big, but the feelings are very familiar.
If you've got a reader who already knows their Triceratops from their Stegosaurus, they'll love being the expert here. If not, they'll probably come away knowing quite a lot.
It's all very cosy, too. Nobody is ever really in danger, and every squabble gets sorted out with a sorry.
If they want to keep going with dinosaur names, Dinosaur Countdown counts backwards from ten striding velociraptors, past three tottering triceratops, all the way to a very cheeky zero.
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