Vehicle Exploration! Using Cars & Trucks to Spark Young Children’s Learning

Preschoolers are often fascinated by the vehicles they see on the road, with their different sizes, colors, sounds, and uses. Whether it’s a bus stopping to pick up passengers, a large dump truck carrying a load of dirt, or a firetruck zooming by, children are eager to know what the vehicle is doing and where it’s going. In this article, we share a variety of play-based learning activities and popular children’s books that support early developmental skills by building on little learners’ curiosity about cars and trucks. 

Car & Truck-themed Learning Activities for Preschoolers

Easy-to-Create Vehicle-themed Sensory Experiences

A fun way to learn about cars and trucks is with sensory bins! Young children can explore a variety of colors, shapes, and textures as they explore with cars in bins filled with sand, mud, and water. These bins are especially fun for toddlers and young preschoolers, who enjoy sensory experiences that encourage tactile exploration. An important additional benefit is that manipulating and moving play cars and trucks through textured material offers little ones an opportunity to use the fine muscles and motor skills in their fingers and hands that will help them hold pencils as they start to practice writing. A few ideas for car and truck-themed sensory bins are included below. 

• Car wash: To set up a sensory bin car wash, simply fill a large plastic tub with play cars, water, and a small amount of dish soap! You might consider adding sponges or toothbrushes for little ones to use to clean the cars.  
• Construction zone: A construction zone bin is a fun way for young children to explore different kinds of trucks. To set up the bin, fill a plastic tub with dried beans (if you don’t have those available, you can use whatever material you have on hand, like sand, dried rice/pasta, or even shredded paper), and place play construction trucks in the material. As the children move the trucks around the bin, you might talk with them about the different kinds of construction vehicles and the unique roles each one has on a construction site.   
• Monster truck sensory bin: Little ones are often fascinated by the large size of monster trucks and the loud noises that monster trucks make! You can create a monster truck sensory bin by placing mud in a plastic bin, and then adding in recycled materials such as egg cartons, toilet paper rolls, and empty food containers to form an obstacle course. You might also include some rocks or pretend cones for the cars to navigate around. 

Outdoor Play & Learning with Cars and Trucks

The sandbox is a great place for children to build roads or create construction sites for their cars and trucks. This type of open-ended play experience encourages creative thinking, collaboration, and self-expression.  

Forming roads with sand, and pushing play cars through the sand builds hand muscles needed for fine motor skills. Sandbox play is also a great whole-body sensory experience, as young children can sit in the sand, feeling the texture with not just their hands, but also their arms, legs, and feet. 

Children can use any part of your outdoor play space to create environments for playing with cars and trucks. You might offer children materials they can use, such as blocks, small toys, recycled toilet paper rolls, and natural materials like rocks, dirt, and twigs.

Process Art with Toy Cars

Toy cars can turn an open-ended art project into a collaborative art activity that children can enjoy as a large group. 

You’ll start by covering a table with a large piece of butcher paper so that several children can work on the project together. Then, place several different vehicles on the table, along with paper plates filled with paint for dipping. By placing the car wheels in paint and then driving them along large pieces of paper, preschoolers can observe the different tracks and tire patterns left by each of the vehicles. If you have them available, you can offer a few different colors of paint, as well as vehicles of different shapes and sizes. This introduces conversations about the use of color, size, pattern and texture in this creative art project.  

Dramatic Play with Cars Made from Recycled Cardboard Boxes

Recycled cardboard boxes can be great materials for creating DIY cars for the young children in your classroom to incorporate into dramatic and imaginary play activities. To make cardboard box cars, you’ll need large empty cardboard boxes (if you don’t have any available, you might invite family members to bring some in from home), scissors, tape, and markers. 

These cars will have to be built and set up by educators, but children can help at the end by decorating them with paint, markers, crayons, or stickers. The photos below show three examples of homemade cardboard box cars – by clicking on each of the photos, you can link to instructions for building them.

Little Red Window
45 Minute Cardboard Box Car

Color Sorting with Toy Cars

Because toy vehicles come in a variety of colors, they offer an opportunity to introduce children to sorting and categorization through activities that encourage children to organize them by color. 

For example, you might set out pieces of colored construction paper and invite little ones to place each car onto a piece of paper with the corresponding color, such as red cars on red paper, and blue cars on blue paper. Cars can also be compared and sorted by size. Sorting, comparison, and categorization are important foundational math skills for young children. 

Children’s Books about Cars & Trucks

Reading books about cars and trucks with the children in your care is a great way to encourage children to follow their interests by discovering and learning about the many different types of vehicles and the jobs they do. 

 The books listed below will introduce children to new vocabulary words and spark conversations about how cars work, various types of cars, and the jobs done by the different types of trucks we might see in our neighborhoods. As children learn the basics about how cars work – such as engines powering the car and steering wheels changing the car’s direction – they are also learning foundational STEM skills in technology and engineering, which they will build upon with more complex learning concepts as they get older.

• Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site by Sherri Duskey Rinker: This book tells the story of hardworking trucks at a construction site as they say goodnight– from the crane truck, and cement mixer, to the dump truck, and excavator. 
• Hello, World! Cars and Trucks by Jill McDonald: This nonfiction board book explores different machines, and shares different facts about what makes them unique, including electric cars, tow trucks, and race cars.
• At the Garage by Carron Brown: This book explores what it is like to spend a day at the garage where mechanics repair and restore all kinds of vehicles, including motorcycles, police cruisers, trucks, and cars. 
• Go! Go! Go! Stop! by Charise Mericle Harper: This book tells the story of a town that is building a bridge, from the perspective of a stoplight, and explores the different jobs of each vehicle, from dump truck to forklift.