Learning Shapes With Toy Cars

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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Emma Edwards

During a difficult pregnancy suffering from Hyperemesis Gravidarum (HG) Emma vowed to make every day an adventure once she had recovered. Adventures of Adam is the outcome of completing a 100 day play challenge with Adam as part of that promise. Emma has a section dedicated to HG friendly play activities so that Mums can still be part of their children’s play whilst they are ill.

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