Last week I needed to up my homeschool game. Jackson was getting bored. He was unable to focus on the task at hand. Writing spelling words on his white board wasn’t cutting it.
So how did I solve this problem?
I went to his closet and pulled out all his trains.
I collected all the train books we own (which are a lot).
I grabbed a few more supplies and set up a learning area filled with locomotives, coal cars and steam engines.
Here’s how we made trains part of our school day:
Spelling Train
Our spelling word flashcards became train cars and we put them on a track.
The track just happened to be wipe off tape I scored at the Target Dollar Spot. Jackson wrote each of his words on the train track! This was the perfect activity to get him away from the kitchen table and down on the floor! Because sitting at the kitchen table doing school work gets boring after a while.
After Jackson wrote his spelling words on the train track, we went back and built each word with our magnetic alphabet set! We read the word, wrote the word and built the word! This is the perfect combination to memorize sight words and learn how to spell them! At least it has been for us.
Ten Frame Train
We’re currently working our way through The Good and the Beautiful’s Kindergarten math curriculum. I absolutely love it, but on this particular day, Jackson wasn’t impressed with the activity, so I compromised.
I quickly made my own ten frame train station (nothing fancy, folks!) and found our train manipulatives. I still followed the lesson in the book, but we used trains instead of garden plants. We did basic addition with our ten frame train station and it helped Jackson complete his math lesson for the day.
After the lesson, I was curious if I could find an actual ten frame train. A quick search on Amazon proved that I could! I ordered this ten frame train and I can’t wait to incorporate it into our math time.
Chugga Chugga Read Read
I’m learning that the best thing I can do during our school day is read to Jackson. Other subjects might be a bust, but I can always pull out a good book and read to him.
We read a huge stack of train books on this particular day.
A few of our favorite train books include:
The Little Engine that Could
I’m Fast
My Big Train Book
Trains Don’t Sleep
Steam Train, Dream Train
Where Do Steam Trains Sleep at Night?
How to Train a Train
The Usborne Big Big of Big Trains
Trains Go
So there you have it! That’s how trains saved our school day last week!