Wooo-Wooo: Train Story Time

This week was out train-themed story time.  Our story times run in six-week sessions and I try to make sure to include some sort of “boy” theme each session – whether it’s cars, trucks, construction vehicles, etc.  This session I decided on trains.  It’s not always easy to find books that work really well as read-aloud books for toddlers, especially when you’re reading to a large group of 20-30 kids.

The books I chose for our train theme included some classics and some newer books as well.  We read Freight Train by Donald Crews – a classic story about colors and a great read aloud because the kids love yelling out the colors.  The other great thing about this book is that we learned a new word.  One car is described as the green cattle car and I explained that cattle is another word for cows.  This is a great way to teach young children vocabulary because you can talk about cows all the time but the word cattle doesn’t come up that often.

We also read the book And the Train Goes…. by William Bee.  This is a relatively new book published in 2007 with wonderful illustrations and it’s another great read aloud because the kids get to help make the sounds effects.  And finally the last book we read was called The Rain Train by Elena DeRoo published just last year in 2011 – it’s a beautiful and quiet story perfect for bedtime, but we talked about the rain and how it sounds and the text is written in a very interesting pattern – kind of like listening to a train ride down the tracks.

I definitely want to share the song we listened to as well.  This was a great song – very energetic and exciting to listen to. The CD is called “Ralph’s World” and it has some great songs including “Drivin’ in My Car” and the song we used for our train-themed story time, “Choo-Choo Train.”  If you’ve never listened to this CD – it’s a real treat!  And as usual we learned a little sign language during story time, I taught the kids the word for “train.”