Printable Cars play set

I found this very cute printable Cars play set via Pinterest  on Parents24.com and the Little Joyfuls have been having a blast with it!! 

Play and Learn with Mama: Disney's Cars Theme: Kitchen fun!

 Another little bit of Cars inspired fun - making bread roll cars for lunch! I made an example and set out plates for the children with everything they needed to assemble their own bread roll cars.

   We used:
* Carrot slices for wheels
* Red cocktail onions for headlights
* A small piece of ham for the windscreen (attached with a tiny bit of mayonnaise)
* A Rye roll for the body

Play Food!!!

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!

Play and Learn with Mama: Disney's Cars theme

   Right-o, so by now it should be a well-known fact that we are seriously loving Lightning McQueen of Disney's Cars fame around here. So when I recently saw that Carissa from 1plus1plus1equals1 has a Cars tot book and preschool pack, I knew Sweetpea would just love learning with Mr McQueen! I also added a few activities of my own, and we ended up having a very merry week of playing and learning. I'll be sharing what we got up to in a short series of posts.

Cardboard Cars

   First the little ones had to each have a car of their own, so two boxes from my recyclables stash were converted into box cars. Initially they just sat around in them making car noises, but then Sweetpea became annoyed that they couldn't move, so I cut out the bottoms, and then the race was on!

The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status or ethnic background, is that deep down inside, we ALL believe that we are above-average drivers. - Dave Barry, comedian

   ArrowBoy fetched his old vacuum hose (quite possibly his all-time favourite toy, apart from a real, noisy vacuum cleaner!), stuck one end into an empty garden pot, and used it as the nozzle of his petrol pump! It also doubled as a means of pumping up the tires!!

Life is too short for traffic.

- Dan  Bellack

Giving his car a good scrub!

'Stay tuned' for some more Cars inspired fun in the next few posts!