The manipulative for this weeks #ToolsForLearning is small toys. I couldn’t resist making a play activity based on Adam’s favourite small toy of all time – the toy car! As we have very few shape adventures I decided to create a Learning Shapes With Toy Cars activity.
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Regular readers will know we have a car track obsession. So far our tracks have included a masking tape car track that filled the living room, a DIY track busy bag that we can take out and about, a giant car track for the garden and even one for the seaside.
Our shape road tracks are made from wet and dry sandpaper. I used one piece of A4 sized sandpaper per shape. I used objects from around the house to use as large shape templates. I then found similar smaller sized shapes to draw around in order to cut out the middle of the shape. Finally I cut white electrical tape
into small strips and added these as road markings in the middle of the road. I managed to find objects to draw around for the circle, square, triangle and rectangle. However, I struggled to find anything for a pentagon or octagon. I attempted to draw them independently but didn’t manage it. Luckily Twinkl came to the rescue. I printed their 2D Shape A4 Cut Outs and used these to make the pentagon and octagon roads.
I laid the 6 shape road tracks on the floor. Adam couldn’t wait to start playing. He couldn’t believe it that the road tracks were slightly rough due to being made from sandpaper. This added an additional sensory element to the activity.
Over the next few hours we created several different ways to play with our shape road tracks. Here are a few ideas:
* Drive the cars along the roads and count how many corners each shape has. Identify the shape names.
* See how many cars can fit on each shape. Which one has the most cars on? This is a great activity for spacial awareness to identify the correct sized cars to fit along each road.
* Use the cars to create your own shaped road on the carpet.
* How many cars are needed to fill the inside of each shape.
* Place the emergency vehicles on one shape.
* Can you find any squares in the living room that look like your road track?
* Place all the yellow cars on one shape and all the blue cars on another.
Throughout the activity Adam used mathematical language to name the shapes and their properties without even realising. To him he was just excited he had some more road tracks to play with. I have a feeling our learning shapes with toy cars road tracks will be played with for many hours.
Check out these Small Toy activities as part of the #toolsforlearning series:
Car Parking Lot Preschool Math Grid Game from Life Over C’s
Alphabet Car Wash from Learning 2 Walk
Sorting and Counting with Die-Cast Trains from Crafty Mama in ME
Directionality Activity with Small Cars from Teach Me Mommy
Forest Animals Letter Sounds Activity from Stir the Wonder
What Makes Ice Melt Fastest from Raising Little Superheroes
Fun DIY Phonics Game from Mum in the Madhouse
What Do Animals Eat? Classification Activity from Schooling a Monkey
Color Mixing with Toy Cars from The Kindergarten Connection
AM and PM Time Telling with Shopkins from Sugar Aunts
Sorting Animals Venn Diagram Activity from Mom Inspired Life
Hands-on Way to Learn Letter Sounds from School Time Snippets
Fairies & STEM Activities: Gardening with Kids from Edventures with Kids
Name & Letter Practice: A Painting With Toy Car Activity from Play Dough & Popsicles
Learning Letters & Reading With Cars! from Preschool Powol Packets
Shopkins Sorting from Still Playing School
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- Vehicle Busy Bag
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I love how accessible this is. It is such a fun activity and doesn’t every child love cars!
My kids would love this! Fantastic!
such a great idea. Weirdly we don’t have many toy cars at home, I will have to try and pick up a load as this is a great idea x
#letslearn
Such a clever and simple activity, I’m sure T would love this too! Thanks so much for joining in with #letslearn I’m sorry it’s taken so long to comment. X
What a fabulous idea! I am think about using black foam and mount on heavier card stock for durability. I can see this being use a lot! I have 2 grandsons (2 yrs and 1) and I can assure you I will be making these for them! Thanks for your creativity!
I love this idea! I know some of the kids in my group will be very excited when I’ll show them the shapes. Thanks!
So pleased you love it. Many months later and the shapes are still going strong in our house!
What a great idea. My little guy would love this. Is there a reason you used wet and dry sand paper as opposed to just regular?
Thank you. Absolutely no reason – other than that was what was available in PoundLand!
I will have to get sandpaper on my break this afternoon to make this over the weekend. I have Creative Memories Cutter set with all the different shapes so that should solve shape problem. Wish all these ideas were in a book form to make it easier to save them all. I love all these ideas and having trouble keeping up with the e-mails with them all.