My 6 year old has been a car lover since he was a baby, pointing to cars and trucks that drove by during our stroller walks years ago. As such, we have accumulated a LOT of cars in our toy bins. When he was just a toddler, I started making him roads, parking lots, and little towns on cardboard and he LOVED them!
My son at 2 years old matching numbers on cars to numbers in the parking spots.
When he was 2 years old and showing some interest in learning letters and numbers, I started incorporating some academic learning into these creations. We started by labeling parking spots with numbers and creating corresponding numbered cars. I labeled the cars by adding a small strip of tape on top of them and writing numbers with a permanent marker. He would play for hours with his cars, matching the numbers on the cars to the corresponding parking spots in his town. It was a HIT!
Our town has expanded!! Here my little guy is 4 years old and playing with his town, where he matched his cars to the numbers in the parking lot.
Now that he’s 6 and in kindergarten, I wanted to take this concept and modify it to help him learn color words. Today, we made a little town on craft paper with a couple of stores (I let him choose - and he picked a toy store and Costco ;)) - it’s a good way to pretend to get out and live a normal life amidst this coronavirus quarantining we’ve been doing! For each place in our town, we added a parking lot and labeled each spot with color words that matched his toy cars.
I drew the town for him and labeled most of the parking spaces, with his input. I wanted him to have some practicing writing the color words, too, so I saved a few spaces for him and he got to work writing them out. He was SO excited to have this new town to play with - it’s been quite awhile since we’ve made one of these.
The completed color words parking lot!
After we completed our parking lot, we got to work - PLAYING! Is there any better way to learn than to incorporate play? Our answer is NO - playing is the BEST WAY TO LEARN! When learning is fun, children (and adults!) are more likely to retain the information and make those critical connections in their brains. We had fun parking our cars in the parking spots while imagining scenarios where we visit each of the locations in our town.
If you are working color words, this is the perfect vehicle (see what I did there? ;)) to incorporate some play into your learning! You can easily modify this activity for learners who need more support by writing each word with the matching color. We love to use Mr. Sketch Markers because the scents add a bit of extra fun to our projects!
This activity can be adapted to match a number of different learning objectives - just add some tape to the top of your cars and label them. Here are some of my ideas:
Matching upper- to lowercase letters
Matching numerals to dots or number words
Matching addition/subtraction problems to numerals or dots
Matching letters to pictures with that beginning sound
Matching short vowel words to pictures
Matching digraphs to pictures
Matching sight words
I hope you try this out with your little ones at home. If you do, please comment and let me know how it went and what you worked on!
Keep Reading!
Jill
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