Book Reviews: 火車快跑 Freight Trains

Age：5.5
Grade Level: 0-6 yrs old (read to)
Pages: 31
Sage Level: Level 3 (orange series) completed
Author: Donald Crews

About a month ago, I had a chat with Designer Mom, who mentioned how her daughter is now ready to move onto Chinese chapter books, after spending quite a long time reading picture books.  I immediately realized my mistake with Astroboy’s book reading.  Namely, I’ve been suggesting books that are too difficult, such as Little Bear, for him to read.  Instead, I should have been focused on getting him reading very comfortably and smoothly in picture books.

How do I know it’s hard?  It takes him way too long to finish a page, so long that he doesn’t want to read after 1-2 pages.  You would think I would have learned by now, having gone through it once with Thumper.

Astroboy has been resisting even reading picture books.  He’ll read if I ask him to, reluctantly.  I tell him it’s one of his daily work, to read something or be read to.  We negotiate pages.  But it’s not the way I want the kids to enjoy books, reading because Mama asked.

I reminded myself that Montessori is about providing the proper environment and other things will fall into place; that I really need to follow my own advice to others and not be in a hurry for him to read.  At his age, he needs to be given a freedom of choice in all his activities, and improve his comprehension by having lots of books read to him.

So I took what I learned from Thumper’s recent reading of the Reading 123 series.   I re-started from the lowest level possible and gradually increased the difficulty level.  First I gave him those books from Windmill Publishing that I’d mentioned I wasn’t too thrilled about, put it in a basket next to his bed, and gave both kids a 30 minute nightly bedtime reading time.  I guess sometimes it pays to buy books you’re not too thrilled about.  Those books are perfect because they’re stories like Little Red Riding Hood, Three Little Pigs, or Thumbelina, with simple sentence structure and large fonts.  I’d forgotten how much Thumper liked these books as a toddler.

  

The great thing about reading-in-bed time is, I’m not there to critique or correct his mispronounced zhuyin (he still has problem with tones and mis-reading).  I just left him be and every few days replace the books in the basket with progressively harder books. Giving him a a book basket rather than choice from our whole bookshelf allows me to pick level appropriate books for him.

I find that when he reads in bed without me, he tends to read longer books and more total number of books.

After about two weeks, I pulled out 火車快跑 Freight Trains by Donald Crews from the bookshelf during school. I chose the book because Astroboy loves trains.  This is one of my favorite books.  As I’ve mentioned before, it is so masterly translated.  I read the English version years ago and I vaguely remember thinking the Chinese is even better than the English version.

Another change I made was not forcing asking Astroboy to read.  Instead, I read the book to him in a very rhythmic way, like the rhythm of a train going forward.   I even add sound effects and moved my arms as I flip between pages.

一列火車跑得快，
跑過鐵軌運貨來。

chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga

紅車廂，在最後，
工作人員坐裡頭。

chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga

綠色油罐車，裡面裝滿油。
黃色大貨車，好像大漏斗。

chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga

綠色動物車，載滿馬牛羊。
藍色無蓋車，裝貨真不少。
紫色貨櫃車，安全又可靠。

chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga

運煤車，黑漆漆。
火車頭，最神氣。

chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga

過山洞，穿隧道。
運貨火車向前跑。

Then I put the book back in his reading basket.  Note I didn’t ask him to read at all, even though I knew he could.  (Pats self on back.)

Here are a few pages from the book.  You can click on them to see bigger pics.

The next day, he brought the book up himself to read to me during school.  He came upstairs that night, trying to avoid sleep.  “Mama, I need to read a book to you before I go to sleep.”  He read it yet again in the car, 3 times in fact, on our way down to our weekly co-op.  Because I told him the cadence of the words are like a train, and he’s currently very obsessed with speed, he would read it once very fast (bullet train), once slower (passenger train), and once very very slow (freight train).  He had so much fun doing that again and again.

Astroboy has now read many other books, several that he loves and re-reads repeatedly.  We’ve also progressed from the Three Little Pigs books to harder books like The Caterpillar Family and even back to Little Bear all the way through!  When he read Little Bear months ago, he only read 2-3 pages and wanted to stop.  But now he is able to read all 40 pages in one setting and keeps asking me for a book that’s longer than 40 pages to read.

So yeah, Freight Trains.  I highly recommend it for everyone’s library!  Here are the links.

• Freight Train (English Version)
• Freight Train (Chinese Version)