What do you do when you want to introduce your children to all the wonderful things that the world has to offer, but all they want to do is play trains? You bring the world to the train set! If anything has ever exemplified this philosophy of mine, it's this wooden train track and toy vegetable ...
Old Tracks, New Tricks by Jessica Petersen
Old Tracks, New Tricks, is a story about three little wooden train tracks who shake up an old wooden train set. But it's so much more than that. It's a way to inspire children to invent new fun with their old favorite toys, and to value and celebrate the creativity of others at the same time as ...
Building with Dreamup Toys Wooden Railway Block Platforms
If your child has ever wanted to be able to combine DUPLO or LEGO blocks with wooden train tracks, good news: there's a new product designed to connect tracks and bricks. Dreamup Toys sent us some of their Wooden Railway Block Platforms to test out, and I'm extremely happy to report that they do ...
Creative Building Play with DUPLO and Wooden Train Tracks
I'll bet most families who own both wooden train tracks and DUPLO blocks have thought, "If only there were a way we could combine these!" I know we did, and we've tried a few methods of doing it, but none of them worked particularly well. That's why I was excited when Dreamup Toys emailed me, asking ...
Mini Sand Play Set
The Little Engineer loves playing the sand no matter what, but he loves it even more when we have some sort of grand plan involving his favorite things. The railroad we built in the sand after reading the Peter's Railway books last year was a plan like that, one that he remembers and has asked to do ...
Wooden Train Ski Jump — Winter Olympics Activities for Kids
I kept my first two activities for the Winter Play Days series intentionally simple because I knew I was gearing up for something epic: wooden train ski jumping in honor of the Winter Olympics! This one activity has caused a huge surge in the Little Engineer's interest in the Olympics, winter ...
Marble Run Train Play: Quarry Cargo Drop
One of our favorite ways to keep train play interesting is to combine our wooden trains with building toys. I've been wanting to incorporate our marble run into a train layout for a long time, and -- finally! -- we set aside an afternoon to figure it out. After learning through trial and error, the ...
Pumpkin Mountain Railroad Building — Halloween Train Activity
We're back with another great Halloween train activity: building a mountain railroad on a pumpkin. Well, two pumpkins, in our case. Once I started setting up the train tracks, we were having too much fun not to bring in the second pumpkin! ...
Building with Mini Light Boxes: Wooden Train Roller Coaster Tracks
The first time we used our DIY mini light boxes with wooden train tracks, the Little Engineer immediately saw the stacking potential (which I hadn't noticed yet). He put one light box on top of another and ran off to get our tallest ascending track to send a train rolling down from the top. We ...
Learning About Trees with Wooden Train Tracks
As I was watching the Little Engineer buzz up and down today's special layout in his room, I realized we somehow managed to learn about art, biology, planning and executing a project, and gross and fine motor skills, all with a pile of wooden train tracks. If I hadn't already been excited about the ...
Sand Tracks: Train Beach Activity Inspired by Peter’s Railway
Today, I have two things to share with you: a fun beach activity that combines creativity, science, and sensory play, and the inspiration for it, a great series of train books for kids of any age! From what I've seen, it can be difficult to find many books about trains that will appeal to ...
Hi, I'm Jessica! While playing trains for the last several years, my Little Engineer and I have had a lot of fun and learned so much together. I'm excited to share our discoveries with other people who have kids who love trains in their lives.