If you don’t already know, the kids don’t really watch tv at home and they don’t watch cartoons much either. Or rather, they don’t get to watch anything on tv unless supervised.

So when we were invited to watch the Chuggington Christmas Live Show at City Square Mall, Ben was like “What’s Chuggington?”

I figured it didn’t really matter if he did not know the various characters featured in the cartoon. I was told that the Live Show, ‘Clean up Chuggington Day’, will focus on an eco-theme, which aims to impart knowledge of being green and share tips on how children can learn to be environmentally friendly. I’d thought that it would be great to catch the show for the message it was spreading and for the kids to learn something about the environment.

We accepted the kind invitation and headed down to City Square Mall yesterday. We watched the live show which featured the three trainees, Wilson, Brewster and Koko, none of whom the kids knew. There was some sing-along and “chugga chugga” action at first and even soap suds “snow” at the end. Ben was a little lost with the songs and couldn’t sing along. When the trains appeared, the kids around him were all screaming their names. The boy was asking me repeatedly, “Who’s that, Mama?” and had to settle for the “red train”, “blue train” and “green train” to make sense of the story that was unfolding.

But the best part of the show was that it introduced the concept of recycling to the kids. The three trains wanted to clean up Chuggington and realised that sorting out the trash into paper, plastic and metal was a good way to help save the environment. That was an important message to send to young children, something which stuck to Ben because after the show, he was like ‘Mama, recycling means you sort out the trash. You throw paper in the yellow bin, plastic in the blue bin and metal in the green bin.” He actually remembered what the Chuggington crew did in the show!

After the show, we were given an opportunity to meet and greet the chuggers on stage to take a photo with them.

In addition, we were also given two complimentary Chuggington Holiday Fun train tickets so we could head down to three different stations to enjoy colouring fun, receive a balloon and bring home a photo memento. The kids also received a goodie bag with a Chuggington tote bag and pencil case, much to Becks’ delight (this girl is into bags these days!)

All in all, the kids had a good time. Best of all, they learned something new. I’m going to see if I can colour code trash bins at home so they can practise sorting trash according to plastic, paper and waste!