The Polar Express

The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg is a wonderful Christmas book.  We don't own it, sadly.  Hopefully that will change in the future.  We do own the movie and so I decided we should do some fun things to go along with the story line.  On Storyline.net we found Lou Diamond Phillips reading the story so that is how we "read" the book today.  

Their is a polar express website with lots of fun games and activities including this one below that has your child draw pictures of things that might be in Santa's sack.

 We also found this fun sequencing activity and the train below at this site.

 I put a train track around our kitchen using masking tape.  We had fun pretending to be trains.  If I had more time I would have had my son help make me a train out of old boxes, but we are getting close to crunch time with Christmas and my oldest son's upcoming birthday so we just used our imaginations.

 We waited for my oldest to get out of school for the rest of our activities.  I gave them each a Polar Express ticket that they could use to get on our train.  Then we rode around the kitchen before heading to the living room where I had hot cocoa and cookies waiting for them.  They snacked on those while we watched the movie.

There are tons of great ideas out there that I came across.  It'd be fun to have a Polar Express party with pajamas and the whole bit.

Here are some links to sites that have a collection of great ideas:

Ms. McBee's Kinder Bugs

Ready, Set, Read

Mommy and Me Book Club