Digger to the rescue by Mandy Archer

Ill. by Martha Lightfoot. Busy Wheels series. Scholastic, 2013. ISBN 9781742835099.
Tractor saves the day. Busy Wheels series. Scholastic, 2013. ISBN 9781742835129.
(Age: 4+) Recommended. Picture book. Machinery. There are four books in the series, Busy Wheels, which show machinery on a building site involved in situations where the driver uses the machinery to rescue or save someone or something in trouble. Each book uses simple sentences, with new words that apply to the building site and the machines in bold print, allowing a reader to mull over the word, its spelling, its look, it meaning and pronunciation. The illustrations are outlined in black, with bold primary colours featuring the machinery and the users. At the end of each book, several pages take a closer look at the piece of machinery used in that story, allowing the reader again to become more closely acquainted with the machine and its parts, both pictorially and with the words used to describe it.
In Digger to the rescue, the foreman and the builders and their machinery are building an adventure playground, and the first half of the book outlines what the workers are doing, in preparing the playground. But a kitten is stuck in the tree, so work stops while the digger and its bucket is used to rescue the animal.
In Tractor saves the day, a similar scenario is given. The tractor is shown doing the work on a farm, and when a tree falls down across the road, it is the tractor and the farmer who haul the tree out of the way. Both books are easy to read, will teach the reader about a piece of machinery they may not know about, and tie it together within a very simple story.
Fran Knight