Showing posts with label trains. Show all posts
Showing posts with label trains. Show all posts

Sunday, November 11, 2012

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! :)