Children’s Hour: The Train Ride

Children’s Hour is a feature posted every Thursday here at Lucybird’s Book Blog. Children’s Hour is my time for reviewing children’s picture books. In my job in a nursery I encounter lots of children’s books, and these are the books I use for Children’s Hour.

You can find links to past Children’s Hour posts here.

I’d love to hear everybody’s experiences of the books I review too, and feel free to post me a link to your own reviews, I’d love to make this a bit interactive.

The image (if you were wondering) is taken from Shirley’s Hughes’ Alfie and Annie-Rose books which I loved as a child.

I read The Train Ride to the kids because they have been obsessed with trains recently (one of them went on holiday

with his Dad and spent the whole time on the train, or the tram, or the underground, or the bus). It’s a very basic story. A girl is on the train, what will she see out the window?

It has a nice rhythm to it with the repeated “What shall I see? What shall I see?” and “That’s what I see. That’s what I see.” making it sound like a train. Those are the bits the kids like actually. They can join in easily. Otherwise they find the story a little uninteresting. It probably would have helped if the book hadn’t fallen apart and been stuck together in the wrong order! (How does someone even manage to do that- especially when the title page is stuck in the middle, makes no sense).

The pictures are nice, and I guess the kids can say what they see- if the pages are in the right order.

Buy The Train Ride:

Paperback (£5.03)

Big Book (£12.72)