How to Make a Birthday Party Countdown Train

This is how I made the train birthday party countdown for my son which proved to be quite educational for the kids and also a lot of fun for the whole family.

I wrote before why a birthday party countdown is good for the kids. Now if I have you convinced to do one also, have a look how I did the  train birthday party countdown for Lukas.

What you need for a train birthday party countdown

• A printed train engine drawing, or alternatively you can draw one of your own
• Some envelopes (as many as the number of days left till the event you have in mind)
• Some sheets of colored paper (black for the wheels  and blue for the windows)
• Scissors, glue and paper tape

This is how you build a train birthday party countdown

For the engine, I found a train engine to print on this website. I would have liked for Lukas to color his own train engine, but the birthday countdown was meant to be a surprise so I ended up doing that myself 🙂

For the wagon connections, I used a piece of ribbon that I taped to the wall using masking tape. I used the same masking tape to stick all the wagons and the engine to the wall, so that they can be easily removed without any damage to the wall.

For the wagons, I used 10 envelopes – there were 10 days left until Lukas’ birthday – and I cut out 20 circles from black paper for the wheels. Then for the windows I used rectangles cut out from blue paper. On each rectangle I wrote a number from 1 to 10 to show the number of days left till his birthday.

For the “daily surprise” I put in each envelope a surprise activity as well as 3 small candies and 3 stickers (so that Lukas would share them with his 2 sisters). I then put everything together on the wall in the living room, high enough so the kids couldn’t reach it by themselves. I first taped the ribbon and then the engine and the wagons on top of it.

The activities were each time small things that Lukas likes and that we’d do together during the day. For each activity I would make a small drawing and write down the activity on a small paper. And so we had ice cream, played with lights in the dark, had some friends sleep over, made some creative activities and had fun with lots of things that my son loves.

For the 10 days that it lasted, the kids have been getting up enthusiastic every morning, excited to take a wagon down, open it and discover the surprises inside. As for the parents, we had no more “how much time till my birthday” kind of questions. So we all loved our train birthday party countdown! 🙂

As you might have read in my previous post on why to make a birthday countdown, Victoria is already expecting to have a countdown of her own for her birthday. Just that she prefers fairies over trains … so if you have ideas of how I could make a fairy birthday countdown, I’ll be super happy to get some inspiration.