Rereading Donald Crews’ classic picture book “Freight Train” was the inspiration for this week’s storytime. This is a great book to teach colors, shapes, and new vocabulary to children who are interested in trains and transportation.
I chose two of my other all-time favorite train books to read aloud, “Down By the Station” by Will Hillenbrand (which you can sing the words to) and “Chugga-Chugga Choo-Choo” by Kevin Lewis.
Other great books to use for a train theme are “The Little Engine That Could” by Watty Piper, “Animals Aboard!” by Andrew Peters, and “Two Little Trains” by Margaret Wise Brown.
Art Project: We created models of the rainbow train from the book “Freight Train”. Each child was given rectangles for cars, a black engine die cut, and lots of mixed-media fun stuff to put inside their train cars. I also provided discarded children’s magazines so kids could cut out pictures of things they would like in their train cars. Here are some photos of the kids with their projects:
