I think husbands / wives / partners of us Home Edders deserve a medal.  They are the ones who have to go to work while we get to stay home and have the fun with the kids, they come home after a hard days work often to deal with an exhausted partner, they get the joy of convincing their partner not to give up and yes they too end up home edding the kids over the weekends.  Mine does all of the above but he is also often the voice of reason.  The voice that, when late at night I am wanting to create something for the next day will often ask – are you sure you need to do this tonight OR can you not get a FREE template for this off the internet ?

So over the weekend when I had a lightbulb moment and wanted to make Pink a train to use to practice her addition (the idea being that I write a sum on each carriage and then she has to arrange the carriages in order of the answers eg the carriage with 5+4 will come before the carriage with 8+2).  So instead of going to bed like a normal sleep-deprived person should, I decided to try and make my own.  Normally I would have been able to do this but after spending the whole of last week dealing with 2 kids full of hay fever and not sleeping my attempts where not that great.  Lucky for me I live in the age of the internet (have I mentioned my love of Pinterest lately !!).  And I found a FREE editable train to download off the trusty Twinkl website.  I printed mine off onto card and laminated them so that I can re-use it with my whiteboard markers.

I started off by writing some sums on the carriages that I knew Pink could do just so she could understand what I wanted.

Then we moved onto some harder sums and some counting in 2’s and counting in 10’s (I wrote the numbers on top of the carriages and then Pink had to sort the order out).

We also used them to practice our spelling.  Pink wrote the name of the animal on each carriage.

I wrote the number and then Pink got to write the matching word (eg I would write 8 and Pink would have to spell out eight) – sorry no photo of this.  I also got Pink to practice her rhyming words.  After writing the names of the animals on top of the carriage for a 2nd time we wrote some rhyming words down the side of the carriages.

And lastly I  wrote some words on the top of the carriages and Pink had to arrange the carriages in order so that they made a sentence.

And we have still not finished with these yet.  Pink informed me this morning that tomorrow she is going write the words on the carriages and then I need to put them into the correct order to make a sentence (she loves being the teacher).