Thomas & Friends is a Very Useful Magazine

My first foray into magazines for my son was not very successful. We paid a rather high subscription price for a picture book magazine (Ladybug) that never held his interest. So I was leery of falling for another marketing ploy and ending up with a magazine that my son would never read.

I figured we would wait several more years before he became a magazine aficionado. Then along came a magazine to prove me wrong.

It shouldn’t surprise me that it was in a hobby shop where my four-year-old son would first find a magazine that would keep and hold his interest from month-to-month. After all, this was the second store to which he learned the name as a toddler (the first was Barnes & Noble). Our local hobby shop, Rider’s, had two displays up that always delighted our son—a Rockenbock demonstration and a Thomas the Tank Engine setup.

It was near the latter setup that our son first discovered Thomas & Friends magazine. The retail price was $4.50, but given our son’s enjoyment of that double issue, it was well worth the cost.

Thomas & Friends is published by Redan as part of their “Fun to Learn” product line and uses Rev. Awdry’s Thomas the Tank Engine characters to create a combination magazine and workbook.

The magazine is published on a bimonthly schedule and includes activities in each one that focus on reading skills, creativity, counting, and cognitive skills. Each of the activities, of course, uses one of the familiar characters from the books and television show. The table of contents provides a key for parents explaining the icons that are associated with each type of skill or activity.

Many of the issues also have pull-out posters or work sheets.

Each issue has an overall theme to which each of the activities relates. The most recent issue’s theme was "going backward and forward." The read-aloud story at the beginning talked about how some engines (such as tank engines) could go backward as easily as they could go forward, but other engines (such as tender engines) could not go backward easily.

Other activities include memory games, counting, drawing, copying letters, finding matching sets, making flags, and searching for details. The activities are designed to be fun for a fairly wide range of ages. With parental help, a three-year-old could do many of the activities in the book. An eight- or nine-year-old who is a Thomas the Tank engine fan could take pride in being able to complete all the activities without help.

One of the monthly features is a “bulletin board” where the editors pin up colored pictures and photos that readers send in. They are typically pictures of trains in the series or kids dressed up in train or conductor outfits. There is often a prize sent to the sender of the picture, such as a Thomas the Tank Engine backpack. This page is one of my son’s favorites, in part because he sees pictures that are of the quality that he can draw.

There are some advertisements scattered throughout the issue, though relatively few. Each of the advertisements is for Thomas the Tank engine products—something that can make it difficult for children to distinguish between the ads and the articles and activities. However, given the subject of the magazine, this is an incident where I find the advertising to provide useful information—sources for Thomas paraphernalia—so I can’t really complain.

The magazine is relatively short—approximately 30 pages per issue. However, it has just the right number of activities to keep the attention span of my preschooler. We look forward to getting a new issue every other month and I’m quite certain that we’ll continue to subscribe for as long as our son continues to be interested in Thomas the Tank Engine.