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This post is sponsored by Mattel but all opinions are my own. I am happy to share with you our Thomas & Friends Super Station Play Date! #superstationwalmart
Play dates are something that Miss M has become a big fan of since she has turned 4. She has always been social, but now that she is in prek she has started wanting to see her friends outside of school. If I am being truthful, I enjoy having play dates every now and again too. I like planning activities to keep everyone entertained. I don’t miss teaching, but I miss creating activities. This allows me to do just that! Take a look below to see what I keep in mind when planning a play date!
Here is our Thomas & Friends Super Station Play Date:
Include Books: Literacy can be included in everything! We had a few train books at our house so I just pulled them out before the play date. You can always go to your public library to find books related to your theme. Board books with flaps for the little ones and more detailed books for the older kids.
Academic Activity: There are so many ways to make learning fun! For the age range of kiddos that were coming over I decided to do a color sort activity for the academic activity. I knew some of them would be able to do it very easily where others were still learning. This allowed the ones who already knew their colors to support those that didn’t. I simply drew a train engine on black paper and cut it out. Adding circles to full pieces of construction paper made the cars. Then, I gathered items out of the girls’ rooms that coordinated to the train cars to be sorted.
Fine Motor Skills: Some kids really excel when able to sit down and concentrate on something. Often times fine motor activities are single person activities as well. This allows space for kiddos who might be overwhelmed with group play and needs a few minutes by themselves. We pretended the tickets where the passes to get onto a train. The tickets needed to be punched! Most kids enjoyed the challenge and wanted to punch more tickets.
Imaginative Play: This is the big one! Make sure there is something the kids can do that is imaginative play. It’s so fun to see what kind of things they come up with. We used the Thomas & Friends Super Station as our main piece. It was easy to pick up at our local Walmart which is always a plus when I am planning the play dates. But we liked it because it can be set up in several configurations. This ensured it fit in our play space and it allowed the kids to get creative in making their train station.
Everyone Included: One thing I make sure to think about is making sure the imagination play space can incorporate many children. A bonus is if it is set up in a way that they can even bring something of their own to contribute to the play. With the Thomas & Friends Super Station it is a multi-system track set which means it can work with the TrackMaster™, Thomas & Friends™ Adventures and MINIS. When I talked to the parents about the play date I let them know that they could bring their own Thomas & Friends trains. Some of the kids where so excited to show off their trains and add them to the Super Station. Surprisingly, they all shared very well!
Gender Neutral: I am a huge fan of keeping play gender neutral. I’ve tried very hard to allow my girls to choose their own favorite colors and toys to play. This is intentionally done by not categorizing as “boy” and “girl” things, toys, colors, etc. So I like to carry that into our play dates. Some kids might not have that experience at home. My daughter loves to play with Thomas trains right now so let it be!
Those are the things that I think about when considering what kind of activities to do during a play date. There are 4 overall things you must do to plan a play date. Thinking of the activities is one of them, but check out what the other things are in my other blog post 4 Must Do’s To Plan A Play Date.
If you want to have a Thomas & Friends Super Station play date you can get your Super Station at your local Walmart. All the tracks and trains can work with this Super Station which make it easy to add on to for future gifts as well!
Until Next Time- Truly Love,
Cassie
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