Trains!




After reading The Polar Express and seeing April Larremore's unit on The Polar Express at Chalk Talk http://larremoreteachertips.blogspot.com/search/label/Polar%20Express
I just had to add a mini-unit on trains. 

 



I LOVE this story...I read it to my girls when they were small.  This book loosely ties in with the train theme but I mainly use it to teach Christmas traditions in Appalachia. (I'll have more on that later with another post on Christmas Around the World.)

 

We charted what we already know about trains first. 
It was surprising what they already knew.

I liked April Larremore's sentence train so we made our
own using our color coded noun, adjective and verb format.



Sight words are written in black, adjectives are in red, nouns are blue and verbs are green. We brainstormed various adjectives and verbs and everyone chose their own from our list.



Of course, it was time for a fresh hall display! They had to read their sentence to me before we posted their work on our wall.

  


The red train is moving.

I plan on using this format at least once a month using our

seasonal theme.  So next month, snowmen or snowflakes...

I'll be honest, literacy, social studies and science come fairly

easily to me...math is another story. I did find some great train

math activities from http://www.makinglearningfun.com/themepages/TrainPrintables.  I downloaded the train number book that can actually be used as

a literacy center since it requires the children to stamp out the

number words.  My team has gotten so many ideas from my friend, Suzan, at krazyforkindergarten.blogspot.com/ for seasonal math

activities that we are very excited about.  Thanks, Suzan!