6 Construction Books that Crash, Dig, and Build!

Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, by Richard Scarry
Richard Scarry’s Busytown books remain classics of the construction genre for many reasons—the characters are charming animals, and each page is packed with details, incident,s and intrigue. In what other book can see a mobile crane save a tractor from a plunge into a pond, a chain reaction of dump trucks accidentally dumping their loads on each other, and construction equipment clearing a path for a road while a bananamobile zips by, all while Officer Flossy pursues the unrepentant parking meter-flattener, Dingo Dog?

Who Made This Cake?, by Chihiro Nakagawa and Junji Koyose
This construction book flips the normal dimensions of gargantuan cranes and dumptrucks and diggers upside down. In Who Made This Cake? the equipment and the construction workers are teensy, and they’re all working together to mix and bake a cake for a little boy’s birthday. You’ve never seen an egg cracked properly until you’ve seen a backhoe clamping it while a driller bores through its shell.

Building Our House, by Jonathan Bean
This book tells the fascinating and heartwarming story of a family that leaves its house in the city to build one in the country. The seasons change while the mom and dad, with plenty of help from the kids, consult the plans, lay pipes, dig a foundation, and throw a frame-raising party. The illustrations beautifully convey the love of this family, as well as their daily industriousness and exhaustion. My son loves the end, where Bean reveals that the book is based on the true story of his family building their house when he was little, and shares family snaps of him and his sister, as toddlers, hoisting rocks into a wheelbarrow and helping Dad pound in the boards.

I’m Dirty, by Kate McMullan and Jim McMullan
The McMullans know just how to communicate with vehicle-loving kids: through a garbage truck full of stinky trash (I Stink!), a tugboat muscling around huge ships (I’m Mighty!), and a backhoe dripping with mud in I’m Dirty. The McMullans’ vehicles are confident, proud, and even sassy. “Up front, I’ve steel arms, hydraulic rams, and a specialized, maximized, giant-sized loader bucket,” the backhoe boasts. By the end of the book, you and your kids will be convinced of this backhoe loader’s superiority over all other entities. Until you read the McMullen’s next book, and think that the train (I’m Fast!) or fire truck (I’m Brave!) are the best.

With Any Luck, I’ll Drive A Truck, by David Friend and Michael Rex
As your kids stare out the car window at all that entrancing construction equipment on the road, they just might picture themselves at the helm of it, as does the little boy in With Any Luck, I’ll Drive A Truck. In this rhyming story, the young narrator imagines himself mixing concrete, shoveling dirt with a backhoe, and operating a crane, with the help of his stuffed pig, turtle, and penguin, who transform, by virtue of his imagination, into a sturdy construction crew. The boy’s toy-choked room on the last page, which looks like a miniature construction site, will seem awfully familiar to some parents.

Demolition, by Sally Sutton and Brian Lovelock
Demolition is the second construction-themed picture book collaboration by Sutton and Lovelock, whose rhymes in Road Work are so catchy I can quote it from memory. (If only there were some kind of prize for that.) Breaking a structure down can be just as interesting to watch as building it up (ask any block-tower-smashing preschooler), and Sutton’s rhymes are as sharp as ever as Lovelock’s sturdy, diligent workers knock a building down with a wrecker and backhoe and then sort, pulverize, and haul away the materials, making way for a bright new park.
What construction books do your kids dig?