Car Themed Toddler School Lessons

Does your child love to play with cars? My son sure does! So, I put together this Car Themed Toddler School Unit all about cars! This toddler activity unit is filled with 5 lessons that include fine motor activities for toddlers, literacy and math activities, gross motor, and crafts. Keep reading to see all the fun we had this week!

Lesson Components

Each of the 5 lessons in this unit include the following activities:

• literacy/language
• math or science activity
• fine motor activity
• gross motor activity
• art activity

Interested in downloading these cars activities that you can print and use right away? Click on the image or button below to check them out in my TpT shop!

Create a Cars Cover Page

We kicked off our Cars unit by coloring the cover page for our unit notebook. We colored and talked about the sounds that cars make.

Sensory Bins

This week, I put together sensory bins filled with lots of different materials that my toddlers could play with. I wanted my kids to experience different feelings and textures. For our first bin, I filled a large bin with flour. Then, added cars, measuring cups, spoons, and some laminated letter C cards. It was a messy one, but my son played with this bin in the backyard for almost an hour. Nothing a quick shower couldn’t fix!

Sensory bins are also a great way to introduce your toddler to letters, sounds, numbers, shapes, and so much more! In this barley bin, we sorted letters into “big C” and “little c” to work on letter identification.

Then, we used the same bin filled with barley to match letter puzzles and continue practicing letter identification.

This car wash station was another perfect way to take learning outside! Before beginning, we read our How to Wash a Car book. I filled a large bowl with bubble bath and another with clear water. I gave my toddler a washing cloth to wash the cars and a drying rag to dry the cars. As the morning went on, the cars made it into the mud and then we really needed the car wash station! This was a great water play station that provided a morning of fun for my little ones!

Art Activities

This week was filled with all the fun arts and crafts that centered around our cars theme.

We colored our C is for Cars coloring page. At this age, toddlers are not expected to perfectly color inside the lines, but it is a great time to begin teaching children how to color inside the lines. Grab your own crayon or marker and sit and color with your child.

My son’s favorite craft was painting this car with our Kwikstix Paints. They dry quickly and are far less messy than other paints!

Another craft that was a huge hit was painting with cars. I added some paint onto a paper plate and my son dipped the cars in paint. Then, he drove his car across a sheet of construction paper to paint the paper. I gave two primary colors, blue and red, so that we could talk about how a new color, purple, was made as the colors were mixed together.

Fine Motor Activities

During the toddler years, it’s importanat to work on fine motor skills through play based activiites. In this cars unit, we work on cutting, coloring, squeezing, pressing, and dotting paint in specific locations.

For our first activity, my son used his kid scissors to cut on a line up to a car. He needed a lot of assistance to make sure he held the paper correctly with one had while he cut with the other.

In another activity, we added in some more letter practice by dotting ink inside circles on the letter C using our dot markers.

Since this is a cars unit, I created a road that my son could paste cars onto. This activity provided great practice using stick glue on the back of each card, then pasting onto the road on the paper.

If you aren’t familiar with what fine motor skills are, then you can read more about this here: What are Fine Motor Skills?]

Math Activities

One of my favorite math activities we have ever done was driving cars into this parking lot. We were working on matching numbers and learning the name of each number. We drove the cars around the parking lot until we found the matching number. Once we found it, we said the name of the number and parked the car in the parking space.

My son loved using this cars counting book. He colored the cars on every page and we counted how many cars appeared on each page.

Gross Motor

We loved this bean bag toss! Conner and I took turns tossing the bean bags onto the correct circles. My son worked on his hand-eye coordination while also reviewing the names of his colors. So fun!

All the Plans and Printables You Need

I hope you enjoyed following our toddler learning journey this week! Click here if you want to download this Cars Themed Toddler School Unit from my Teachers Pay Teachers store. It comes with 5 lesson plans and all the printable materials you will need to make teaching your toddler as easy as possible. I hope you enjoy playing and learning with your little ones this week!

If you want to learn more about how to get started planning activities for your little ones, download my FREE guide for everything you need to know about the skill areas we incorporate into toddler school:

This post may contain Amazon affiliate links. I earn a small commission each time someone makes a purchase through one of my affiliate links, which helps to support The Primary Brain blog. As always, I only recommend products that I love and all ideas shared are my own.

Written on March 17th, 2020 by Laurin Brainard