The boys love, love, love cars. All three of them do. The girls - well they could take them or leave them. In order to captivate the boys, we had a a week full of car themed activities.
The big ramp:
First we took a garage door header and built a huge car ramp. The ramp was wide enough that even our garbage truck could go barreling down it. After playing with the ramp at different angles Spider man (3 y/o) and Superman (3 y/o) decided that it needed decorating. They took the chalk to the top, sides and bottom of the ramp. This soon became a colour mixing task as they enjoyed pouring water down the ramp and watching the colours mix together. Since it was a hot day, the ramp dried quickly and they were able to continue decorating. Not long after that, we used the stop watch to conduct time trials for various vehicles. It was interesting to watch their thought process as they quickly discovered that they needed a starting line. Apparently I was cheating by having my car start half way down the ramp... there's nothing like encouraging some problem solving without directly stating the problem! A few days later, the ramp was still a hit as the boys took to having distance competition. This raised another problem as the younger tots kept moving the cars so the boys were unable to determine which car went the furthest (only one car went down at a time). After a mini-melt down we all put our problem solving hats on and the boys realised that they needed some sort of a recording system. Since we left our chalk out in the rain (a good lesson in putting things away!) they boys decided to use mud lines on the deck to record the distance that each car went.
Painting with cars:
Another hot day activity was painting with cars. We gathered an assortment of vehicles with various tire sizes and treads from around the house. After putting paint on paper plates and laying out the paper, the kids got to it. Even Lighting McQueen (10 months) loved painting with the cars. Despite being an open invitation to play (an opportunity to use the materials in whatever way they wanted), the older kids just enjoyed driving the cars on the paper. The younger tots, Lighting McQueen and Princess (17 months), decided to explore by painting with the sides, roof and headlights of the cars as well. This was a fantastic deck activity, especially since we had the pool set up just a couple of feet away.
Learning about the letter C:
The older boys (both 3 y/o) are developing their phonemic awareness. We decided to stick with our car theme and create a paper car. First I prepped all of the materials (a large letter C, three smaller C's, 6 round wheels for each boy). First the boys glued down their large C's, then drew the dotted lines down the middle of their C roads. After that, they added the smaller C's (cars) and the wheels to the cars. Once we were done adding our cars, we added our c shaped gas fumes to the backs of the cars. It was a hit!
Literature link:
Box cars:
Since we still have a bunch of bankers boxes that we used for moving in the basement, I decided that box cars was going to be our next car themed activity. After covering the side with the boys choices of construction paper, they decorated their boxes. We added paper wheels and steering wheels. Once those were assembled, we added ribbons (seat belts) to help keep the cars up. This allowed the boys to have their hands free to drive their cars!
We had a lot of fun with all of our car activities. We will definitely revisit it again soon!
(Pictures coming soon!)
Today we had a mud cafe... and it was even more fun than it sounds! We made cakes with sprinkles, pies and even chocolate smoothies!
When setting up our invitation to play, I added some water to our dirt bin. I left another big bucket of water available at the end of the table. Soon we had a bin full of wonderful sticky mud! 
Some of the tots decided to add some of the dried pasta and beans to the bucket of clean water... other tots used it to rinse their tools. There are no rules to our play as long as you are not endangering yourself or others or interrupting another friends play.
