Play and Learn with Mama: Disney's Cars theme - Learning activities

   A large part of our Cars inspired playing and learning from last week was inspired by the lovely tot book and preschool pack I downloaded from www.1plus1plus1equals1.com (You can read more about our other Cars inspired activities here, and watch this space for more posts later this week)

  I laminated most of the pages for durability so that we can use them again for the younger siblings in years to come, and I keep them with all our other lap books in a file.

For this counting activity we used our Unifix cubes to practice one-to-one correspondence. I didn't want to interrupt the learning that was taking place, so no picture of that, sorry.

I turned the Cars Shapes three-part cards from the Tot Book into a file folder game which both children enjoyed playing: Arrow just matched shapes and colours, while Sweetpea also matched the names of the shapes by identifying the first letters.

We used the Cars Colours cards for a quick scavenger hunt (I was making dinner and this was a lovely little activity to keep the little ones occupied while I was busy!)

I also added some home-made activities using junk mail, a few cheap sticker sheets, and one Disney magazine I bought at the supermarket last week. 

This page from a junk mail add is glued on the back of our lap book. I asked Sweetpea to colour in all the 9's she saw on the page.

Sensory matching cars. They had great fun with these and we played with them a few times during the week. I blind-folded the children, handed them a card, and they had to find its match from the ones spread out in front of them. The textures are (clockwise from top left): tulle, tin foil, sandpaper, corrugated board and polar fleece.

This was from the magazine - I laminated the page and Sweetpea had to circle the differences with her dry erase marker.

Practicing to draw straight lines - stickers, hand-drawn 'roads', laminated.

A mini book to go in the lap book. Sweetpea glued down pictures cut  from junk mail and I 'interviewed' her with questions like: "If you could have a car of your own, what colour would it be?" (Red, of course!!), "Where would go in your car?" and  "Who would you take with you?"

Sweetpea knows the days of the week, but we are working on sequencing and the order of events at the moment, and this Days of the Week Highway was a great tool for talking about what comes before and after, what happened two days ago, etc. This is not a great picture, sorry! Each of the cones has the name of the day of the week written on it, and every morning after breakfast the children moved the picture of Lightning McQueen (cut from the magazine and laminated) one day forward. We are now using it for a second week, since ArrowBoy is really enjoying this and sings a days-of-the-week song every time we do it!