First of all, this car idea can be used for any time of the year but because I didn’t have a chance to share this post when I really would have liked to, Â I want to take just a second give you a little background information about my next couple of posts.
Here in Indiana, we celebrate the Indianapolis 500 each year at the end of May.  Just like most communities, when there is a special event that is a community wide event, we also like to celebrate the event in our classroom. Of course, for the children, we break down the community event into bite-sized pieces of information that the children can relate to and that lead up to our overall celebration of the community event. In this post and in my next post, I will be sharing some of the ideas we explored which includes the parts of cars, a DIY magnetic race car and track, and our big race day event…
We kicked off our study of cars by reading the book “My Car” by Byron Burton. Â This book is an awesome car book. It explores the parts of a car in simple to understand language and illustrations and this book has been a highly requested item to keep on our classroom bookshelf all throughout the school year. Â I had one little boy that chose this book pretty much everyday after snack during our library time…
This particular page of the book, shown above, inspired the activity I am sharing with you today. Â After reading the book, we came back to this particular page of the book and then I gave each child a set of felt car parts to use for building their own cars…
Each child used the illustration in the book as a way to build their own felt cars and as the children worked, we expanded our vocabulary of words as we used the words “body, engine, wheels, and steering wheel”. Â Super fun and easy way to talk about the parts of a car…
I suppose you could say this was a felt puzzle of sorts only without a puzzle board to work on. Instead, the children just used the book as their guide to building their cars…
However, as you can see, our little mechanics interpreted the car manufacturing process in whatever way made sense to them…
A super simple way to explore the parts of a car and a great starting point for what was yet to come in our celebration of the Indianapolis 500 race day…
Available on Amazon
Links to Grow on
Car Painting from Teach Preschool
DIY Car Mat from Teach Preschool
Cars and Color Words from Teach Preschool
Car “d” Game from Toddler Approved
DIY Felt Car Mat from My Little Gems