READY, SET, BUILD!

A safety primer for budding construction engineers.

“Sketch a dream. Post a chart. / Hatch the plan before you start.” Donning sturdy boots and a hard hat, a blue dog sets out to design and build a house using both hand tools and heavy machinery. Each stage of the enterprise features a big, bright, very simple cartoon scene and a cautionary remark—from “Use your legs and not your back” when lifting loads and “come down steady” on a ladder to “Goggles on before you slice. / Cut just once—but measure twice.” Of course, there’s also a break for lunch. At last the dog and a small bird who has been looking on step back to admire their finished building and then head home to hang up the hard hat, hit the pillows, and dream of future projects. Kids will enjoy seeing the bird’s involvement, which ranges from reasonably credible, as when it perches on the dog’s hard hat while eyeing a worm at lunchtime, to the whimsically impossible, as when it helps the dog lift a cinder block by fluttering aloft while holding a string tied to one end in its beak.

Good, artfully delivered advice for would-be builders of any age.