Puff Puff Chugga Chugga...stART

I found a fun new blog carnival on A Mommy's Adventures this morning that is perfect for me.

All you do is read your child a story, do an art project to go with it, and link up a post about what you did. As a former PreK teacher, this is right up my alley.

Landon and I have been doing some of these off and on since I started staying home with him in November. The last five weeks, we have been going to story time at the library every Monday morning and then checking out some fun books for the week, so we've had some great ones to extend into projects. So far, we've made a sheep for The Boy Who Cried Wolf, "magic picture butterflies" for The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and a foil knight for Cowardly Clyde. I wish I would have known about this blog carnival for those. They were fun.

For today's project, I chose this book.
Landon loves all things train, so I thought this looked like a fun book to share with him. In the story, a walrus, a bear, and an elephant catch a ride on a little train to go into town to do their shopping. The engineer is afraid that each one is not going to fit, but they do. When they get to town the three animals each buy tons of things, which the engineer again thinks will not fit on the train. A bee causes a problem on the train and it ends up off the tracks. Everything that was bought in town is scattered. The animals find a creative way to solve their problem and the train and the engineer return home.

It's a really cute story and Landon really enjoyed it.

We did two projects for this story: painted with the wheels of a toy train and made a collage train with scrapbooking paper.

One of the things we are working on for Landon right now is writing his name. When we came home in November, he could get the L and the O if it was written for him to copy. We have progressed now to him being able to write it by himself without looking at anything.
For now, he writes it all in capital letters. Pretty soon we will begin working on lower case.
Once his name was on his paper, he squirted some black paint onto a paper plate.
Then he drove his train through the paint
and then drove the train on his paper.
He really enjoyed this part, so he did it a few times and made a track around the paper. Here is the finished product.

Then, we got to work on the collage train. Another thing that I am focusing on for Landon is cutting skills. He does NOT like to cut because it is hard for him. He has great large motor skills, notsomuch for fine motor, but we're getting there. So, I have him cut something every chance I get. For the collage train, I drew the lines on the paper for him to follow and let him cut out the pieces.
He had a hard time with it, so I made the deal with him that he could cut one and I would cut one. Eventually, we got it done.
Then, I put each piece on the paper so he would know how it went together and I had him glue them all on. He likes to use LOTS of glue, so it was pretty wet when we finished.
Our finished project
doesn't really look like the vision I had in my head when we started. But, I kept reminding myself that the process is what matters, not the product, and resisted the urge to correct things. I'm pretty proud of it even if it doesn't look the way I thought it would.

Just for a minute today I kind of missed the days when I would have had 20 of these little cuties lined up along the windows of my classroom. Maybe I should have the girls make some this weekend so it won't be so lonely. :)