I feel like I’ve been trying to catch up with a backlog of journal articles, blogs, and newspapers all week. But I did manage to squeeze in a few books for fun.

Steam Train, Dream Train (Chronicle Books, 2013) is a lovely bedtime story by Sherri Duskey Rinker and Tom Lichtenheld. A menagerie of zoo animals meet a steam train as it pulls into the station. They get right to work, loading the train with paint, sand, food and just about every toy imaginable. Once the train is loaded, the animals “settle in, and tuck in tight.” After it leaves the station, the final pages show a sleeping child with a toy train at the foot of the bed. Outside the window is a billowing cloud that looks suspiciously like a plume of smoke from a train. Although this is clearly aimed at the preschool set, I know a few Kindergarten and 1st grade boys who will love this book.

Watch the trailer here:

In If You Were a Chocolate Mustache (Wordsong/Boyds Mills Press, 2012), J. Patrick Lewis serves up more of his singular humor. Long poems, short poems, concrete poems, riddle poems, this collection has something for everyone. Matthew Cordell’s pen-and-ink drawings are the perfect complement for these madcap poems. This book is a must-have for elementary and middle grade classrooms.

Be sure to visit Jen and Kellee at Teach Mentor Texts to find out what others are reading today.