DLTK's Crafts for Kids
Train Paper Craft

Contributed by Leanne Guenther

This train is a simple cut and paste paper craft with simple pieces that is easy for young children to make.

The locomotive or engine of the train is the part that provides the motion -- it is usually at the very front of the train (though sometimes it will be at the back). A very long train may have more than one locomotive (engine). The rest of the train is just pulled along (without the engine, the train won't move)!

The locomotive (engine) doesn't carry any cargo. The train cars that are pulled by the engine carry cargo (freight) or passengers. The locomotive (engine) is where the locomotive engineer does his work, driving the train.

Materials:

• a printer,
• paper,
• B&W version: some crayons, paint, markers or pencil crayons
• scissors,
• glue

Craft Instructions:

• Optional: Sometimes if doing the project with a group, instead of providing the paper template pieces to the kids, I will make cardboard tracers that they can use. To do this:
  • print out the black and white template and cut out (or you can hand draw your own pieces)
  • adult traces these pieces onto a piece of cardboard (old cereal boxes or the cardboard backs of paper pads work well)
  • provide these cardboard templates to the children for them to trace onto construction paper.

• Print out the craft template of choice.
  
  I always prefer the B&W version but sometimes kids want a color version, especially if they're making the craft as part of a bigger project (for example, it can be fun to arrange the train as part of a bigger scene on a bulletin board -- pulling train cars made from rectangles and circles with some cotton ball clouds and handprint sun in the sky, triangle evergreen trees.
• Color (if using the black and white version of the craft) and cut out the template pieces. If you are coloring this particular craft, I think it's a good one to use something like water color paint or fingerpaints.
• You can assemble your train however you like it!  It doesn't have to be just like mine, but here are the steps to how I did it.
  • Glue the large circle on the bottom, back of the train (the largest wheel).
  • Put the three small circles along the bottom, front of the train.
  • Put the square in the top, back of the train as a window.
  • Glue the long skinny rectangle across the widest part of the train.
  • Optional: Draw a locomotive engineer smiling in the window!

Templates:

• Close the template window after printing to return to this screen.
• Set page margins to zero if you have trouble fitting the template on one page (FILE, PAGE SETUP in most browsers).

Small Train     color   or   B&W

Large Train Template 1     color   or   B&W

Large Train Template 2     color   or   B&W

Print friendly version of these instructions