A Quick Trains Unit Study

Last night my five year old asked what a caboose is.So I told him we'd do a train lesson today. Here are the free materials that we used for the lesson.

Prep Work

Before we started the lesson I put together a coloring and activity book about trains. There are several trains printable activity pages from Homeschooling at About.com. I just selected a few pages that were age appropriate and combined them with a couple of trains coloring pages and this trains activity book. Then I stapled all of the pages together.

How it Went

First we talked about trains. Usually we read a book from netlibrary.org but I couldn't find one this time. So I just explained about the different cars and some of the people who work on the train.

Then we watched the following videos. I was surprised at how long the videos held the children's attention. While watching the videos I pointed out the tracks, different parts of the train, and some of the cars.





Then the children completed their workbooks.

And lastly they made a train paper craft from DLK-Teach. I printed out the pages that are already colored and let the children cut out and paste the train onto a sheet of construction paper.