Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus: A book review

This book from New York Times bestseller author and illustrator Mo Willems is a fun and engaging picture book about, as the title suggests, not letting a pigeon drive the bus.

It can be read just as it is intended – a story about not letting the pigeon drive the bus. But I found myself using it in another way to introduce the concepts of persuasion and responsibility.

Reading it through the first few times my 3.5-year-old was giggling and shaking his head ‘no’ along with the storyline.  On further readings, I was able to pose the questions in different tones and relate it back to scenarios he’d experienced at home or at our early learning centre.

When reading the pages where the pigeon uses a variety of different tactics to try to convince the reader to let it drive the bus, it’s giving us the opportunity to bridge such topics as consent.

Or who to trust while posing open-ended questions to him such as ‘what would you do if…’  or ‘can you think of a time when…’ without it being a scary topic or feel like a lecture from boring old Mum and Dad.