The Yellow Car Game is a travel game my family has played for years. The rules are simple. The first person to spot a yellow car and shout “yellow car!” wins a point. You would not believe the heated discussions a one-rule game can produce. “I said it first.” “Parked ones do not count.” “That is a van, not a car.” “That is not yellow, it is an ambulance.” The most frequent argument, though, is about the score. On a long drive nobody can remember who is winning. So I made the Yellow Car Game Busy Bag, a little counting board that keeps the tally for us. Ages 2 to 5, though the squabbling suggests the age range runs a good deal higher.
What you need:
- A piece of recycled cardboard cut to fit inside a small zip pouch or wash bag. A cereal box panel is about the right weight.
- A roll of green duct tape to cover both sides of the board. Any color works; green just reads as grass under the roads.
- A roll of black electrical tape for the roads.
- A sheet of thin white sticky labels, cut into short strips for the road markings.
- A needle and a length of thick black thread.
- Twenty small yellow car-shaped buttons. Five per road, four roads. A craft-shop button assortment usually has them, or any small yellow bead works.
- A small zip pouch to keep it all in. Optional, but it turns the board into a grab-and-go bag for the car.
Making the counting board
Cut the cardboard to fit your pouch. Cover one side completely with green duct tape, smoothing out the wrinkles as you go. Lay four strips of black electrical tape across the board in evenly spaced horizontal lines to make four roads. Cut the white sticky labels into short thin strips and stick them down the center of each road for the dashed markings.
Thread the needle with the black thread. For each road, thread five yellow car buttons onto a length of thread, lay it across the road, and push the needle through the board at each end. On the back, knot the thread and secure the ends flat with a piece of electrical tape. When all four roads are strung, cover the entire back of the board with green duct tape to hide the knots and tape. The buttons should slide along the thread on the front with a little friction, the way beads slide on an abacus wire.
Two ways to play
The board works as a counter or as a tally board, depending on how many kids are in the back seat.
For one kid, use the whole board as a single counter. Every time they spot a yellow car, they slide one button from the left side of its road to the right. When all the buttons on one road are used up, they start the next road. At the end of the journey, count the buttons on the right to get the score. The sliding is good fine-motor work, and the counting-up at the end folds in some early math without anyone noticing.
For several kids, give each player their own road. Each spotted yellow car moves that player’s button across by one. On a really long drive, agree that each button stands for five or ten cars, so you do not run out of buttons before you run out of highway. The tally version settles the “what is the score” argument completely, which was the entire reason the board got made.
For another car-themed busy bag that packs flat for a journey, our Seaside Car Track Busy Bag uses painted craft sticks and small laminated road signs that fit in a sunglasses case. For another counting-and-sorting busy bag in a tin, our Mr Men Shapes Busy Bag uses plastic linking shapes and hand-drawn sequencing cards.
One closing observation. The board has lived in the door pocket of the car for the better part of two summers. The green duct tape has scuffed at the corners and one of the button threads has been re-knotted once. It has not stopped a single argument about whether a yellow taxi counts. It has, however, ended every argument about the score, which is the one that used to last until we reached the next rest stop. Worth the half-hour of threading buttons for that alone.