If I had to choose a vehicle author-illustrator, it would have to be Donald Crews. My favorite, Freight Train , shows a train of primary-colored cars traveling through night and day, country and city. It is an apparently simple book that reaches ever so many levels including learning colors and demonstrations of how colors blend. All concepts are shown with a special graphic style that earned the book a Caldecott-honor. For the pleasure of young vehicle fans, Donald Crews has also written Carousel , Truck , Harbor and Schoolbus .
Vehicles are a great way to introduce concepts.
Away , with illustrations by Thacher Hurd, follows the same format as a boy chases an escaped wheel through a variety of adventures, making appropriate noises and sometimes creating comical havoc along the way. Counting is part of the format in Bus Stop by Nancy Hellen. First through seventh passengers are introduced in graduated pages and then as the last page turns, we see that the square cuts become bus windows for all the people we've met. One of the concepts we sometimes ignore in books is imagination. Fire Fighters is filled with tabs to pull, flaps to turn and actions of everything from equipment to different ways of putting out fires.