Fireman Small - Fire Down Below! by Wong Herbert Yee

Fireman Small - Fire Down Below! by Wong Herbert Yee

Rating: 4 stars

There are a lot of fireman-crazy boys out there.  And girls, too.  This is a sequel to Fireman Small (review here), which we liked.  This one looks a little frightening.  I wasn't shaking in my boots, but check out the cover--Fireman Small looks a bit intimidated with the rain pouring over him and the fire coming up from below.  I actually turned it down a few times at the library because it looked a little scary.

But we went for it and got it anyway.  We aren't afraid of a book!

It's really good.  Not fantastic, I've-gotta-buy-this-now, but good.  And it's really a good one to write down and check out during fire prevention week (October--make sure to visit your local fire station!).  It's a nice poem--again, like with the original Fireman Small book, I can't seem to get the beat just right, which annoys me a little--and longer than the first, for better or for worse.  But, through the poem and illustrations, he teaches how to crawl under the smoke, breathe through a wet towel, and to stop, drop, and roll.  And all of this is done through the story, so you can focus on it, or not. 

Here's an additional picture of me reading this book to a fireman-crazy boy, almost-birthday-boy G.  (I can't help but laugh as the kids are kind of crawling over me to get to the book, and the paparazzi, a.k.a. Stacey, is taking photos the whole time.)  His mom is my very best friend since first grade (she listened to my long-winded book report on the Bobbsey Twins umpteen years ago), and now our kids are friends.  Life is good!

Fireman Small by Wong Herbert Yee

Fireman Small by Wong Herbert Yee

Rating: 3.5 stars

So there's a new thing in our library: bean bag chairs.  Ben especially loves them!  I try and get the kids not to take a few steps back and jump into them; I do my best to express how they were purchased and placed for kids to sit and read.  They do that, sometimes, but it usually takes a few jumps for them to settle in between the beans.

What does this have to do with Fireman Small?  Well, the bean bags are placed not in the middle of the children's area, but on the outskirts, between John Segal (of Carrot Soup acclaim) and Paul Zelinsky (think the gorgeous The Wheels on the Bus).  The bean bags are right next to the Z section.

So we spend a lot of time at the end of the alphabet when the bean bags are available.  That's why and where we found the cute little series by Yee.  This is a long poem of a book about Fireman Small, the lone fireman in a small town.  He is trying to get to sleep but emergencies keep waking him up: a cat in a tree, a fire in town, and things of that nature.  Lorelei loves the poem, and Ben loves firetrucks, so it works for both of them.  As the bean bags were available on Tuesday afternoon when we popped into the library after nap time, we just got the next in the series.  I'll let you know how it is!

PS  I couldn't find an Amazon link for the book, so I put up a tape recording/book combo, definitely not what we checked out.  It seems that the book is not available to purchase.  (Oh by the way, if you buy books through my blog, I get a teensy-weensy commission, though you're not charged any extra.)