Trains Week for Preschoolers

Nothing will ever be more exciting than a Thomas & Friends/Trains week for Adrian. We did it last year and I repeated this year and it was a HUGE hit again. I should be posting 3 different times on this subject as we had plenty to keep us busy this last week.

Air, Water, or Land?

Using some of his Thomas & Friends vehicles, Adrian had to sort whether the vehicle was to be seen on road/tracks, in the water or in the sky. Needless to say, it was a quick and easy activity for Adrian.

Matching & Memory Game

A nice little game of matching Thomas & Friends cards and then a memory game followed. There are lots of cards so I let him do the memory game by color to make it a tad easier. We did all the orange cards together, then the blue ones and finally the green ones but when it came to matching, all the cards were on the table. He loves this game and I'm thinking of putting the cards in my purse for when we travel.

Dot-to-Dot

I like this worksheet. Unlike most dot-to-dots, this one has two parts. The train has alphabet letters to join together and then the number dot-to-dot next to it. On top of it, the latter really has to be done well in order to discover what it is and yet, it is easy enough. Adrian worked really hard trying it go through each dot. I had to call the letters and numbers out otherwise he goes straight through and doesn't hit the dots. This printout was found on ThomasTheTankEngineFriends.

Sorting by Color...and more

I brought a small basket of trains to sort by color for Adrian. It's very basic (here it's only blue and green colors) but then I dug deeper into the sorting activity and it also became a counting activity. A loves to count so it was very pleasant for him. We sorted by quantity of wheels, by color, by steamies versus diesels, by tendered engine versus tank engine, etc. Then we had to count the wheels to sort the 4 wheels from the 6 from the 8 and we also counted funnels, whistles, tenders. We extended further by counting the number of trains with glasses, with red stripes and so on. It went on and on. Try it with your kids. The possibilities are endless.

Sorting by Wheel Quantity

Color by Number

If your kid is fond of Thomas & Friends, he probably knows about Patchwork Hiro. Hiro used to be very colorful train before being re-built and re-painted. I found a coloring sheet (ThomasTheTrain) and used it to make a color-by-number activity. Adrian loved it. I wish there wasn't so many lines so there would be less confusion when it came to what is inclusive and exclusive of an area to be colored but oh well. It was lots of fun.

Not pictured but also a big hit was the game of Green Light/Red Light. We pretended to be a train waiting at signals. I showed either a green or red piece of construction paper to let him know whether he could proceed or not. 

More on Train Week later. :)