Trash Trucks! | Daniel Kirk

Trash Trucks!

by Daniel Kirk
Putnam, 1996

Book Description
Rattle! Batter! Crunch! Shake! It’s the crack of dawn, and the TRASH TRUCKS are rumbling down your street! Can you believe the noise they make? BASH ‘EM, CRASH ‘EM, here they come! It’s serious fun, and kids will love watching the garbage gobbler do their dirty work. They’re TRASH TRUCKS!

Reviews of Trash Trucks!

Review from Publishers Weekly
Sesame Streeets’s Oscar would be hard pressed to match the enthusiasm that Kirk shows for garbage collection. In this soaring lyric to litter, choreographed to the RATTLE, BATTER and CRUNCH of a summer morning, voracious garbage trucks drool after piles of debris. With a tongue-in-cheek tome in his art and his text, Kirk portrays the trucks as urban heroes, and his rhythmic rhyming tale has all the flash of a Broadway musical.

Daniel Kirk speaks about Trash Trucks!
Sometimes when I drive my kids to school in the morning, I get stuck behind a garbage truck.
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Then we have to roll up the windows, and sit and wait until the garbage men are done throwing big messy bags of trash into the back. I always think that it looks like men are tossing the junk into a big ugly mouth! I decided to write a book about trash trucks as if they were living beasts, garbage-gobbling creatures who lived only to devour our trash.

When it came time to prepare the artwork, I decided to try a little collage mixed in with my oil painting, I went through a big pile of magazines and cut out photographs of products from advertisements. I had hundreds of little cutouts on my desk! Then, whenever I wanted to show garbage in the book, I took some Elmer’s glue and stuck down the little photographs on top of my painting. This approach gives Trash Trucks a unique look, and offered me an opportunity to try out a new technique!

Things to think about and do after reading Trash Trucks!
1. In Daniel Kirk’s Trash Trucks, the characters are both vehicles and living creatures Think of some other vehicles that you could make into characters by adding faces.
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Draw a few of these characters, and give them names. If you want, make up a story about the life of one of these characters, and what his or her day is like!

2. Make a list of things your family throws in the trash each day. What is the smelliest trash you throw out? Which kind of trash would fall apart and break down in nature, and which kind of trash would last a long time once it got to a dump or landfill?

3. Find out what your town does with the garbage that trash trucks collect. If your town has a recycling program, find out what kinds of uses there are for recycled products!