I think trains are awesome! Who says trains are only for boys? When Gwen turned 3 she wanted a Thomas the Train birthday cake and carried around her toy trains all the time. They even got 'blinged' with her jewelry. I was pretty excited to have a week of trains for Caroline to enjoy in Pre-K!
Freight Train by Donald Crews is such a cool book! I love the illustrations and we had a great time saying "whoosh" every time the train roared past something. I got this free printable train from Kizclub.com which is an amazing resource for free printables! It comes in color or b/w pdf. To save ink, I did b/w and just colored it in to match the book illustrations.
After laminating and attaching felt, this train was perfect for learning through play! After reading the book we did memory recall and tried to put the trains in the correct order. Then we did color matching and threw in a couple fun train songs to round it all out. Both girls have asked to play with the felt trains repeatedly this week (which makes me feel great!)
Caroline got to make her own name train. This fine motor activity included cutting and gluing AND picking up all those little pieces to carry as cargo. Since she worked so hard, she needed to fuel her body with cheese and dark choco chips box cars carrying raisins down a carrot track! She loved it and such a simple snack makes the gratification even sweeter!
While I did this activity with Caroline, she only did a handful of letters before losing interest. When Gwen got home for Kindergarten, however, she was all over this activity like white on rice!
The printable ABC train was from Selma Dawani's Transportation Pack (a free download) that I can't seem to find online again. But she has a blog with other free things, so maybe it will pop up again in the future.
Gwen correctly matched all the capital letters with their lowercase counterparts! We also enjoyed reading:
Hope you enjoy some fun train activities at your home!
Fun stuff!!
ReplyDeletethese are just fabulous!! how do you have time to do all this? all the prep work, I'm so impressed. And I knew what you were gonna do before you did it! awesome!
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