Adventures at home with Mum: cars

Dimples had lots of fun with this one.
He loves cars, a typical boy! When he is asked what he would like to do his reply is usually ride bikes or play cars. When he goes to Nannies and she asks what are they going to do, as always his reply is just play cars. Usually he draws up roads or sets up car parks and makes awesome glug glug sound effects as they get petrol. To make the usual car play a little interesting with a dash of learning I quickly threw together this car park.

You will need: A large piece of paper or cardboard as your canvas, markers, dot stickers numbered.

I drew up the car park and numbered the car spaces. Use as many or as little numbers as your child is comfortable with. I added some different coloured spaces, to coordinate coloured cars with and labelled some dot stickers with corresponding numbers.

Instantly Dimples got to work, with no instructions he understood the aim of the game. Pretending to make engine sounds as the cars drove through the car park to find the correct space. This was a good activity for number recognition, ordering and matching numbers. I went through and practised counting with him.

Dimples is great at pretend play, it was delightful watching him and listening to him chatter away as engines revved, trucks had reversing beep sounds and the cars precisely drove around the car park and then reversed into the right spot. Next he would chant as he grabbed another car. At first it was any old car but then he started looking for the one that came next and we started counting through the ones that had been parked playing "what comes next?"

Just for the fun of it I numbered the spaces 1-15 and then 15-1. I must remember to identify 6 & 9 the right way up and to write clearly and large enough as there were a few numbers he asked what is that! whoops! I did say it was a quick throw together activity didn't I?

If you are reading this you must be interested in making a Mud Rally Sensory Box?
This was a fun outdoors activity that I set up for Dimples near his Mud Kitchen.
It has all the Sensory and Tactile benefits of playing outdoors with dirt and mud, as well as these 8 benefits of playing in Mud with one appealing difference; It is contained in a Sensory Box.

I realise not everyone has a mud kitchen (or wants one) and many parents aren't open to letting their child freely explore mud but they still want to provide the learning experiences and messy fun that mud provides for their child.

The solution? The Mud Rally Sensory Box.

Its all the fun and mess but contained in a box.

This means it can even be bought inside on a spill mat or done on your back patio as a quick and easy messy play activity that can be emptied and cleaned out afterwards.

Simply mix a little dirt and water into the tray, add cars and once the messy play is finished, return the mud to its original place, rinse out the tub and rinse of the cars. Easy Peasy!

Dimples gathered some of his diggers and carted them up the yard. I wasn't keen to do the entire messy play thing on this particular day and we had limited time, so I put a shovel load of dirt into a plastic tub and mixed in some water, I sat his cart next to it and let him play.
It wasn't long before he came down from his tree house and came over to start exploring.
Initally he was very delicate, mixing the mud and carefully pushing a car around slowly and then inspecting its wheels. It didnt take long for him to warm up into his usually imaginative self.

Diggers, dump trucks, monster trucks, bull-dozers, tractors, jeeps and 4wd cars were lined up into the mud. The tractors were great at pushing the mud and clearing a path, Dimples experimented a while with this, looking intently at the cleared path. He added a little more water and watched it wash mud back over the paths.
He made some rally tracks and imagined that it was a race circuit, thrashing the monster trucks through the mud (with sound effects of course). Pretending they were doing all sorts of "tricks", flipping, rolling and skidding.
He used his diggers and dump truck for some track construction, even going to the extent of burying a car under dumped out mud.