Toddler Books: Emma Garcia

I would be remiss if I did not do a post about Emma Garcia for the toddler books I love. Her books are awesome. My son loves Toot Toot Beep Beep. Emma Garcia was the first author name he could say when he started requesting books from his shelf (he also loves Sally Sutton, but that will be a different post).

A got a Disney Cars Duplo set for Christmas. The "groovy" van was included in the set. The whole way home (from grandma's house) A held his van and said, "Toot toot goes the big blue van, toot toot." My librarian mom heart melted. Needless to say, I love that he recited a picture book and not the actual movie in which the van is a character.

Aden's big blue van

        

These books are great for building various early literacy skills: narrative skills (repetitive text), phonological awareness (rhythmic text and noises & sounds), print awareness (large text easy to point to), print motivation (fun and bright illustrations and stories with relevant topics), vocabulary (lots of different cars, trucks & tools), letter knowledge (easy to point out specific letters in words because text is so large).