I’ve been trying to incorporate proper lessons into my homeschooling plans to supplement their playground/monkey face lessons, which although fun, don’t seem like the sort of thing that will get them into Harvard. By proper lessons, I mean the stuff that they’re required to learn in school like spelling and numbers and shapes. Pretty much stuff that they have absolutely no interest in.

Whenever it comes to these lessons, my kids have the attention span of a fish and 2 minutes into the lesson, they either ignore me or simply get up and walk off unceremoniously to go play with trains instead. So I’m constantly on the lookout for ways to make learning fun. Or as I like to call it, sneaking in a lesson so they think they’re playing but I’m actually teaching them something valuable.

I came across this brilliant idea from Jus and decided to try it on the kids. It’s a home-made sorting game where they can sort these cards according to shapes or colors. In one game, they learn shapes, colors and words. Bam, 3-lessons-in-1.

It’s very easy to make, even for someone as artistically challenged as I am. I printed out these shapes in different colors and cut them up into little cards for them to sort.

I actually wanted to laminate it but my laminating machine decided to eat up all my laminating pockets last night so I had to improvise by taping up the sides with magic tape. Tedious but it worked.

I was really surprised by how much the kids loved it. Well, Kirsten only wanted to sort the stars and she would scour the pile then go “TADA I GOT STAR!” I tried getting her to sort according to colors but she was all “no mommy, it’s wrong” and went for the stars instead. But at least she understood the concept of sorting, which was already a success.

Truett, as usual, was very focused on doing it right. He would peer at the stack of cards on the bed before carefully selecting each one as I shouted for random colors and shapes. He also stole my trademark finger-to-lip move whenever I’m pondering something intently like “hmm, let me see…”

Seriously, any game that makes him think this hard has got to be good.

Truett has been eyeing a wooden train set for several months now. He first saw one at The Better Toy Store, a Thomas train table set that cost a whopping $600. Usually, we try to indulge them since they don’t ask for toys very often but for that price, the train set better be made out of gold and not wood. I checked it many times and I was pretty certain it was all wood (not even wood-plated gold) so we told him there was no way we’d fork out $600 for several pieces of wood.

He didn’t kick up a fuss, but instead kissed the train and waved a longing goodbye before saying, “next time daddy buy train set for me.” That was smooth, and secretly, it made us want to get him the set even more.

So when we made our trip to Florida, we were on a mission to return with a wooden train set for the kids for a lot less than $600. After scouring every toy store in the Orlando vicinity, we decided on 2 different train sets (1 from Imaginarium and 1 from Circo) for about $40 USD. Since the tracks were compatible, I figured I’d mix them up to create a giant set for them.

Joining up the sets was a lot harder than it seemed. I didn’t have any instructions to follow so I had to freestyle most of the time. Also, Tru had a lot of demands like the track had to run under the bridge and I had to use up every piece of track and it had to be rectangular not weirdly shaped. After many hours trying to come up with a design, I finally settled on version 5.3.

The good thing is that it was a huge hit with the kids. It’s by far their favoritest toy and they’ve clocked more hours fiddling with this than any other toy they own. But the frustrating thing is that the playing inevitably degenerates into a Godzilla-destroying-city reenactment. Both kids will stomp on the pieces till they all come crashing down, then they will be all “OH NO TRAIN BROKEN…” and harass me till I rebuild it for them.

I’m thinking of mounting all the pieces on a table for them so I don’t have to keep rebuilding it again and again but I’m a little reluctant to glue all the pieces down permanently in case they want to change the design or add on more tracks in the future.

Any ideas on how I can do this?