All Aboard!

For those that don't know, we homeschool. My oldest son, Kai, has been an insatiable learner from the beginning. By the time he was 2 I had to find some way to keep him challeged as he was already far past most of the "baby/toddler" development toys/books/etc. He just cannot get enough and asks a million questions about every little detail of every little thing. So I began using a preschool curriculum with him very early on. He LOVED it. He wanted to do it every single day and was learning like crazy. I'm thankful that he loves learning, but it has presented me with a whole set of challenges that I wasn't planning on when I signed up for this mommyhood thing. By May of this year I realized that he had outgrown his preschool curriculum. There was nothing new in it for him anymore. So I tried a few workbooks and things at a Kindergarten level and found that he did most of them no problem. In fact, when we were trying to find curriculum for him we gave him a math placement test and found that he tested at a 1st grade level.
I had no idea what I was going to do with him. Sure, it was great that he was working at a 1st grade level, but....he's 3. He couldn't even start Kindergarten at a school for two more years. So I either had to ignore his pleading for more, or I was going to have to homeschool him. (This was our initial draw to homeschooling. Since beginning, I have found so very many things that I love about it)
We went with Sonlight Kindergarten Cirriculum and I must say, we love it. It is a literature based curriculum and he looooves books. Kaytie, my 2 year old, also loves reading the books with us. The books are excellent and the teacher's guide gives excellent thought provoking questions and ideas to help him learn. However, I have found that he tends to latch on to one specific thing (i.e. sea animals, horses, dinosaurs) and becomes obsessed with that one thing. It's hard to get him as excited about other things (except math, he could work math problems all day and not get tired), he is, after all, 3 years old.
His current obsession (long standing obsession, I might add) is trains. He cannot get enough trains. And so, I decided we would do a unit study on trains. I found I could teach him nearly everything I was going to anyway, including using the curriculum (not lesson plan, but texts,etc.) we had already purchased, and wrap it all around the idea of trains. There are of course technical terms for all of this, but who wants to be technical? :)
Below is a list of things we have done or will be doing in our quest to learn about trains. So for those of you mommas with little ones who love trains, here are a few ideas. Please keep in mind though, that even though he's 3, this is not preschool level. Use the ideas that work for you, tweak them how you like, throw out what won't work. Only you know your little one.

Train math (counting cars, counting items in cars, number recognition- numbers written on engines) adding/subtracting cars, using ordinal numbers (ie, engine: first, car: second, caboose: third), using money to "purchase" train tickets on a train we make out of boxes and decorate (art/imagination), keeping track of how much money we spend running our train, how much money we make from our "passengers" or "cargo" and whether we lost or made money, using shapes to make pictures of trains, finding "missing" cars in a line of numbered cars, learning about distances and speed, reading Sir Isaac Newton and the Laws of Motion (from his curriculum), studying how steam works, studying solids/liquids/gasses, studying energy (potential/kinetic), forces (direct, distant), machines, heat (movement, expansion, measurement), friction, magnets (maglev trains), sound (train whistle), electricity, how trains work (parts of the train, types of trains, statistics on trains), the history of trains, read about trains in Living Long Ago (from his curriculum), study the American Westward Expansion, Victorian times, how trains were used in war, how trains are used now, how trains have been used for good (carrying people and supplies to help others, etc), how trains have been used for bad (movement of prisoners by Hitler, etc), how we are responsible to use the things we have for good or bad, how God feels about these things, locations of railroads, learning about geography by "destinations" on our train, seeing a steam engine in real life, visiting the caboose downtown, visiting the transportation museum, reading The Boxcar Children (from his curriculum), reading/watching The Polar Express, reading/watching Thomas the Tank Engine, studying character qualities from these books/movies, learning reading using a "phonics train" (ie. in the word CAT "C" is the engine, "A" is the car, "T" is the caboose), and much, much more.

We are loving learning about trains! Hopefully you can have some choo choo fun too!