A few weeks ago I posted on here about teaching my 2-year-old son's daycare class about trains and you guys gave me a lot of good advice. Here's how it went down. We ended up doing two train Fridays. My wife pitched in and helped too.
The first train day I dressed up as a conductor and read the kids a train story. Then I had them make a semaphore signal out of posterboard. The blades actually moved up and down and I told them the down meant stop, diagonal meant slow and up meant go. The kids absolutly loved it! My wife and I also to photos of each child wih their signal and an engineer cap on.
Today, I had those picture printed and made train-shaped frames out of construction paper for the children to decorate. This kids enjoyed this. I also set up two loops of Lionel tubular track and the kids just sat mezmorized as a frieght train and a passenger train went round and round. I tod the kids about the different frieghts cars and passenger cars. To top it all off, I ran off a copy of the World's Greatest Hobby beginer's guide for each child's parents. The kids were very well behaved and we only had one minor derailment.
Thank you all for your help. Hopefully I managed to reach at least one child and he or she picks up the hobby at some point.
Modeling the Pennsylvania Railroad in N Scale.
www.prr-nscale.blogspot.com
Congratulations on your successful venture. Great to hear kids enjoying something besides twiddling their thumbs on their hand held devices. Some of them don't haave a clue that anything else is going on in the world.
Thanks for sharing
Good luck,
Richard
GP-9_Man!
Well done!
Dave
I'm just a dude with a bad back having a lot of fun with model trains, and finally building a layout!
GP-9_Man11786 Hopefully I managed to reach at least one child and he or she picks up the hobby at some point.
Cheers, the Bear.
"One difference between pessimists and optimists is that while pessimists are more often right, optimists have far more fun."
I wish someone would have put on a train show when I was a little kid... I didn't learn about model trains until I was about six years old and got an old Marx set for Christmas. I still have the set but the loco doesn't work anymore so I put it on display out in my train room. Anyways, hats off to you for showing the little ones what it's all about.
Good job!
Up here in the Great White North CN has school pack's (at least they use to) That contain a couple of sheets of cardboard where you can punch out passenger cars and a loco and fold them into cars and are held together with tabs. They also contain a wood train whistle a CN pencil, train safety stuff and stickers and a bunch of other stuff. You can get them for the asking, just tell them how many kids in the class.
Brent
"All of the world's problems are the result of the difference between how we think and how the world works."
Reading stories of young kids loving trains is awesome. Good on you for taking time to share your passion with them.