The Giant Car Track is an outdoor letter-recognition activity built from twenty strips of wooden tongue-and-groove cladding painted black, with white masking-tape lines down the middle to look like a road. The strips fit together end-to-end and side-to-side to spell the kid’s name, one letter at a time. The kid then drives small toy cars along the painted road that traces every letter. It takes up most of a back garden and most of a sunny afternoon, and it lasts the summer.
What you need:
- Twenty strips of lightweight interior tongue-and-groove cladding, the kind sold for cladding a feature wall. Each strip should be about 90cm long and 10cm wide. Twenty strips covers a name of three or four letters laid out at giant size on a lawn.
- Black acrylic paint and wood glue, mixed roughly two to one. The wood glue gives the paint a little grip on the soft cladding and keeps it from chipping when the strips get walked on.
- White acrylic paint for the road markings.
- Several rolls of masking tape. More than you think. I used three full rolls and still ran short on the long sides.
- A handful of small toy cars. Standard die-cast or pull-back size is right. Larger cars get caught in the cracks between strips.
Painting the strips and laying the road lines
Paint the cladding strips black on both sides. Two coats. The wood is soft and absorbs the first coat almost completely, so the second coat is what gives a proper black road. The strips dry quickly in the sun. The second coat is an easy job for small hands to help with, though expect more paint on the child than on the wood.
The white road markings are the part to plan for. Sponge-painting the dashes freehand comes out wavering and uneven, like a road drawn by someone who had only just heard of roads. Masking tape works far better: lay two parallel strips of tape down each strip of cladding with a finger-width gap between them, paint the gap white, then peel the tape while the paint is still slightly wet. That gives a clean straight white line. It works out to about a hundred and sixty individual dashes across the twenty strips, which is slow, but the result is sharp.
Once everything is dry on both sides, the strips become a modular road system. They fit end-to-end in long straights and side-by-side in pairs to make turns. The grain of the cladding gives the road a faint texture that can be felt through the bottom of a toy car.
Spelling the name on the lawn
Lay the strips out on grass. Three or four letters works well, and a short name is right at the edge of what twenty strips will cover. Build the name once first so the child can see what it looks like, then take it apart and let them rebuild it. Some letters come straight away; the curved ones like D get muddled with O, and that is fine. Once the name is built, a car can be driven through every letter in order.
The activity scales up. Once the letters are built, the same strips become a track for races, a ramp run on a slight slope, or an obstacle course with garden objects as cones. A whole collection of cars can be lined up along one letter, which turns it into a parking lot.
For a smaller car-track activity that lives in a bag and travels, our Seaside Car Track Busy Bag uses painted lolly sticks and small laminated road signs that fit inside a sunglasses case for the beach. For a quieter learning version that swaps letters for shapes, our Learning Shapes With Toy Cars activity uses chalk-drawn shapes on a patio with a small basket of cars.
One closing observation. The cladding strips last well outside in summer. Left in the garden for a couple of months they hold up fine, though the paint fades slightly where the strips sit in the sun for weeks. Stacked flat indoors over winter, the paint stays solid, and a single set will last several summers.