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My daughter loves trains and it is interesting to know that the subject is as equally fascinating for her as it is with little boys. When the mood arises she can often be found setting up her duplo train track and building trains and cities to go with and around the track.

This week is train week if you haven't already guessed thanks to The Little Engine That Could - the classic tale retold by Watty Piper. Trains feature in a number of other tales we hold including Tootle and Thomas The Tank Engine - both on dvd and book form in our household.

Teacher Vision had a number of activities and printables that related directly to The Little Engine That Could but as we are not located in the States we were unfortunately able to only access three as part of their free giveaway.

About.com assisted with a variety of printouts including a train based version of tic tac toe and a fun train visor for us to make.

Random House had some Thomas related colouring pages and for those fans of Thomas and James, DLTK came to the aid in the way of an easy paper craft.

We are going to attempt to make our own train although my favourite activity for the week is this easy animal train. It gives us some variety on our discussions and we can look at some of our favourite animals while making our train.

For younger readers, we also stumbled upon a number train worksheet.

And our song of the week - I've Been Working On The Railroad of course. Toot Toot!

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Posted By: Michelle Sweeney - Category: Age 3-4, Age 4-6, Books, Craft, DVDs, Reading, Toys

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Barbie Week

April 16th 2009 08:03

Next week my daughter has opted for Barbie Week which has really seen me scratch my brain for ideas and things to do.

We are basing Barbie Week on three golden books published in the mid to late 90's entitled Barbie In The Spotlight, Barbie Soccer Coach and Very Busy Barbie. The lessons these books teach are honesty, fairness and helpfulness so we shouldn't go too far wrong with these titles.

Lots of painting, colouring and well as our pièce de résistance - a fun happy heels picture frame.

Barbie.com has some great online activities including designing a Thumbelina movie poster with your daughter's picture on it.

We are also going to make some cute paper dolls and dress them up with some beautiful ribbon we found - courtesy of Parenting Times.

And after doing some indoor soccer puzzles we are going to get outside and practice our soccer skills which at this moment are very limited indeed.

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Posted By: Michelle Sweeney - Category: Age 3-4, Age 4-6, Books, Computer Based, Craft, Reading, Toys

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Felt Boards

April 2nd 2009 03:20

Felt boards are back in vogue and are very simple and easy to use.

Whether you choose to purchase your own felt board and characters - they retail quite cheaply in many stores - or choose to make your own - they are only limited by you and your child's imagination.

The good thing with felt boards is that once you have the board you can easily make simple pieces to go with it. If you do not want to bother with felt and patterns then you can easily use paper images on boards. Once you have printed off your image, stick a little piece of sandpaper on the back and voila!

This encourages story time, simple play and can be used to inspire and delight.

One of our current favourites is from the Halloween tale, The Little Old Lady Who Wasn't Afraid of Anything.

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Posted By: Michelle Sweeney - Category: Age 3-4, Age 4-6, Toys

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Creative Play With Duplo

February 19th 2009 00:49

Creative play is something that should be encouraged with children as much as possible. Duplo is great for this and can be introduced to children as toddlers enabling them to get many years play out of the blocks up until about 6 years of age.

Duplo is great for both boys and girls thanks to the introduction of packs such as the princess, doll's house and supermarket packs. Basic block sets are a good start for children and additional sets can be purchased for those with specific interests as add ons. We purchased a Princess Pony and Picnic Set for my daughter and she loves to add these to her regular blocks easily spending an hour playing by herself in her little imaginative world.

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Posted By: Michelle Sweeney - Category: Age 3-4, Age 4-6, Toys

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