It is Train Week. Little kids are drawn to things that move and trains are a favorite of many of them. When our sons were little we had trains all over the house. They loved playing with their trains. They also loved playing at the beach so it was always a bonus to be at the beach when the train went by. If the engineer would blow the horn at them while they were standing on the beach waving they would get so excited. Ansel loves trains and he is very excited to play with PaPa’s remote control trains. My brother-in-law collects trains and he gave us one that blows steam out the smoke stack while it chugs down the track. Every few minutes a voice yells “all aboard”. He was so happy the first year we set it up at Christmas and he was given the remote control! He loves anything to do with trains. Danielle takes them on ‘train adventures’ where they go to try to find trains chuggin’ down the track. He is especially excited if it happens to be a BNSF orange engine pulling the train. Curt and I were on a snow hike at Lake Easton and we heard a train coming. We found a good spot to stand on the bridge over the tracks to get a video (and still photos) of the train. We knew Ansel would be so excited when he saw the video of an orange engine coming around the bend. And then, even better, we discovered it was a train with two BNSF engines! It was pulling a very long string of cars and at the end of the string of cars was another set of two BNSF engines but they were facing the other way. It was a ‘push me/pull you’ train! Ansel loved it. We had hit the BSNF engine jackpot!This Is a fun online virtual tour of the BNSF railway. https://www.bnsf.com/about-bnsf/virtual-train-tour/locomotive.html
This week we will be reading about trains and talking about the wheels on the train, how they make the train (and other vehicles) move. We will do some magnet experiments with the trains they have at home and do experiments to see what sticks and doesn’t stick to a magnet. We will continue to talk about colors when we read The Freight Train. I hope you have fun talking trains this week!