Drawing diagrams of trains and keeping carriages in order

My three year old likes to have his train built in a certain way. He can get very upset when it is broken or when we have to put it away. I had been thinking of a way to help him with this and came up with a matching and sorting activity. We have a wooden train with 13 carriages and engines of four different colours. Using paper and crayons I showed my son how we could draw a diagram of the train and record how the carriages are positioned.

Boy with train carriage

First we organised all the carriages according to colour. B loves catagorising things at the moment and enjoyed seeing them all lined up neatly.

Then we counted them and drew the right number of boxes on a piece of paper.

Diagram ready to be coloured

Then B built a train. Together we coloured the boxes, well, I did most of the colouring. He prefers line drawings at the moment. I decided that the idea of the activity was to talk about diagrams, and colouring was a secondary and less important skill at this moment.

Finished train

Then he decided to make a little change. So we drew the boxes again and coloured them accordingly. He was very pleased.

Two slightly different trains

I hope to add to our list of trains in the future, if he builds different trains. But at the moment, he likes them in this order, so in this order they go!

It was lovely to talk about the differences in the carriages and how they should go together.  I’m sure my little boy developed some important skills as we

• talked about colour, shape and size
• created a picture diagram of something real.
• matched carriages as we built a train.

He also get less upset when the train is damaged as he knows it can be easily put together again - in the same order!

Little Red Caboose and Dad Playing Guitar

Using Play Dough to Make Train Accessories and other things

I recently decided to make an effort to bring more play dough into our playtime after being inspired by The Imagination Tree (again!).We play a lot with trains, we talk a lot about trains and train are often the first choice for ramdom You Tube video watching. We have a train set but often find we have accessories missing as our games develop. So we started making train set accessories out of play dough.

Here is our first creation - a crossing:

Play Dough Level Crossing with Plastic Light

 We used this no-cook recipe (scroll down a little!) for the ramps and the gate holders, a cocktail stick for the gate, and a foam bead from a threading set with a broken cocktail stick for the hinge. I was really impressed with our work and wanted to make more. However, my nearly three year old had moved on to other things. So we made some random objects:

A stick, a spacecraft, an imprint of something I can't remember and a couple of wiggily woos*

But we'll be adding to our train set soon. We need a lot of accessories as the train stories just keep on growing. Do you have any ideas? Please comment and let me know.

In addition to the marvelous wonders of play dough, which you can read about via the links above, we also:

• talked about height and width as we measured the parts
• discussed the purpose of gates and hinges
• waited for parts to dry before we could play with them
• extended the possibilities for his pretend play 

For more play dough ideas, have a look at others who took the PLAY DOUGH PLEDGE

*We read about Wigglily Woos in this Sir Charlie Stinky Socks book by Christina Stephenson

Underground Train

We live in a big city with an underground train. My son loves it. He loves anything associated with trains. He must spend 90 percent of his time playing alone ordering his trains, cars and buses around the room. I decided to do something to add to his playtime which we could work on together. So we built our own U-Bahn (underground train in Berlin).

A while ago I spent an early Saturday morning drawing on a dissembled cardboard box to make a road and car park for all his cars. We took this, some empty toilet rolls and some tape, and started talking about how to go about it. It took a while to put enough rolls in place (it was a big box), and I had to do most of the work as it was a little tricky for a two year old. He started playing with something else in the room as I finished, but once I was done he was very pleased with his new toy.

The rolls looked a little like the pillars we see in some stations, and it was pretty dark under the cardboard so it looked quite realistic. It was a little wobbly, but this made him think carefully about his movements in and around the structure. The road on top became the way into the space inside the train track, where there was a shopping centre and a bus stop, according to him.

I loved watching him move around - on tiptoe, bending this way and that, peeking through the tunnel, reaching in to move the train. He made up a story about a man in a van. All in all, he practiced quite a few skills. These are some I noted:

• He used his limbs in different ways developing his fine and gross motor skills.
• He created stories by himself expanding his imagination and vocabulary.
• He watched me make a whole new level to his play area with a bit of card and some tape increasing his capacity for creative thinking.

We spent the next few days improving on the underground train to make it stronger and more adaptable to changes in the track.