Customer Reviews

Dig Dig Digging

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

My two year old son adores this book and it's a lot of fun reading it aloud to him. Each page describes a piece of equipment - eg diggers, helicopters, rubbish trucks, cranes, bulldozers - and how hard they are working ALL DAY LONG. The language is really descriptive and captures the noises that the machines make. The words on each page have been laid out to reinforce the job that the machines do too. The illustrations are bright and appealing. This book is a definite winner with any child who likes noisy machines (and what toddler doesn't?!).

I've a 2.5 year old son who is fascinated by machines and wheels.

I am not, and find most of his favourite books on these subjects rather tiresome.

However, this book is fun: its catchy rhyme and rhythm, and its quirky but somehow interesting and realistic pictures entertain me as well as him. He revels in the masculine, repetitive onomatopoeias which are fun to read out loud.

My two year-old loves the book and loves the pictures, but I felt like it didn't always make sense and could have been written better. Sometimes the authors force the text to fit the form they have set up. The Tracker goes "squelch sqelch"?? But, the pictures are good and my son LOVES it. I just wish I was happier reading it.

Our 3 years old son received it as a gift. It is one of his favorite books. He read it every night twice for the first two months he got the book. My husband and I enjoy reading it as well (which is a plus). The colors are bold and bright. Each page is dedicated to one type of vehicle. Each vehicle has its own rhyme and all the rhymes follow similar structures. It is easy for the kids to read them back to you after listening. Our 3 years old loves to hear himself reciting lines from this book. I will strongly recommend this for any 3-4 years old who is particular into trucks and cars.

"Cranes are good at lift, lift, lifting. Up go the bricks to the top of the building. Down come the pipes, very slowly, spinning. They can work all day."


"Dig, dig, digging" is a sandbox full of action scenes, played out on a large, vividly colored scene. The text sounds brawny and muscular, the machines look industrial and hard-working (but freshly painted in non-traditional colors--this might be waht Leggo@ looks like to a three-year old), and the workers are all men. I'll return to that oversight below.

It's all about nouns (vehicles and machines such as garbage trucks, dump trucks, tractors, road rollers, bulldozers, helicopters) and verbs (rolling, flattening,rumbling tumbling,gripping, pushing, whirring, zooming,whizzing, and rescuing)! Both the text and the illustrations add small but important details to the main scene, beefing up the action and realism another notch: Garbage trucks gobble, and crunch, squeezing and squashing. A tractor sends dirt flying, while in the background fields we see a somewhat alarmed bunny, a blase bird atop the tractor (and one pulling a worm from the ground), and a scarecrow obviously not scaring any birds! There's a lot of heavy moving, lifting and scraping, but talented illustrator Alex Ayliffe keeps the images clean and easy to grasp: Even the crashing rocks from a tipping dump truck don't kick up any scene-obscuring clouds of dirt.

The text is also working up a sweat, following the action by tilting upwards or down, varying in length, and especially in size ("CRASH!"). However, even the narrative takes a break, as every passage ends with the calming repetition of "They can work all day." There's one real flaw here: Despite having a female author and illustrator (Yes, Alex Ayliffe is a woman), there's nary a woman in sight. This isn't a political critique, but in these days of gender integration in even the roughest, toughest, traditionally masculine jobs, it just doesn't look right. This may be of ZERO concern to your young toddler, but kinders and older kids may notice. On the other hand, the worker's faces are so amorphous looking that gender is a bit indistinguishable; however, they resemble men much more than women. I also wish that the author had found a more creative and understandable gerund in the sentence "Transporters are good at car transporting." "Vroom, vroom, vroom," indeed, but there aren't a l ot of kids familiar with "transporting."

Despite these relatively minor objections, this is hearty winner of a book, especially with it's compact, vigorous sentences, and the imaginative colors and composition of Ms. Ayliffe. The book combines some serious muscle with a relaxing refrain, and, on the last two-page spread, we see a long shot showing the machines resting, and your young audience (after all the excitement) may emulate the big sleeping machines; now that the day is over,"they can rest all night."

My 2 year old son loved this book when we brought it home from the library so much that I decided to buy it. He is captivated by the bright colorful full-spread pictures. The text is awkward in a couple of places, but that doesn't lessen his enjoyment, just mine as I read it. A worthwhile book for your little boy's personal library because it covers such a big variety of vehicles (even garbage trucks gobble-gobble-gobbling).

My boy was only slightly interested in machinery until we got this book. Now he's pointing out Garbage Trucks, Fire Engines, Diggers, and Road Rollers everywhere we go, and giving the corresponding cheer "gobble, gobble; race, race, racing; dig, dig, digging; roll, roll, rolling."

This book has a musical rhythm that makes it fun to read, and the illustrations are gorgeous.

My little boy had it as a present 3 years ago (he's now 6) and wasn't that interested. H/ever my little girl (3 1/2) loves it and won't go to sleep until I've read it to her. The last page where they all go to sleep if nice. She's knows that that is lights out.

Reviewed by Oliver (child guest reviewer) from England

I like everything about this book as it has every type of machine I can think of. It's a boy's book.

Lots of the machines look like my real toys. I love the tractor digging the field over, and I imagine this is what my field will be like when I'm a vet, because vets need tractors to get to the sick animals.

This book is so much fun because the machines are doing real jobs, just like I see when I go to different places. I can find out how they work and what they do, which makes me think about what I would like to do when I'm big.

There's lots of rhyming in the book, which makes it easy for me to read. In fact I can read it to Mummy and Daddy at nighttime now.

Armchair Interviews says: Wonderful story book for boys, and girls who like big machines that do stuff.

I ordered this after getting tired of checking out the big hardcover Dig Dig Digging from the library over and over. Didn't realize this one is "based on" the original. Missing at least half of the pages of the original, and the text is much, much shorter. A fun book for a toddler, but my preschoolers miss the rest of the story! (Hate to admit it, but so do I.)