Train Craft and Writing and TpT News!

So I'm really going all out now! First a blog makeover. Now, a Teachers Pay Teachers store! I sure hope I know what I'm doing!

This month's OCR unit is on transportation. One of our selections is a poem about trains. Last year, as a follow-up activity to this reading, I gave each of my students a picture of an empty caboose. They had to choose what item they wanted to put in their caboose, draw the item, and then write a sentence about it. I went all out with the hallway bulletin board display. Took me around two hours to get it done.

However, this year, I wanted to change it up a bit. I felt like there was too little writing and too much of me providing the students with already made art. So I changed it up and created this:

We read another train book to learn about different types of train cars. Then we created our train craft. I told the kids to come up with three things their trains would carry and to draw them in the train cars. The following day I taught a mini-lesson on using commas in a series and did a quick review on writing plurals. And our craft and writing was complete!

My example to the class

One kid decided to include a flatcar in his train.

The final product!

 The kids had a blast with this. This is also very exciting because creating this product motivated me to try a hand at selling my stuff. I have now created a TpT store and this train craft and writing activity is my first priced product on there. Please check it out here! Comments and feedback are appreciated! :)