Setting Up the Transportation Theme in the Toddler and Preschool Classroom

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Inside: Setting up a transportation theme in the toddler and preschool classroom is so easy, because there is such a wide variety of activities to try. We added some favorites that our children loved!

The transportation theme is one that I could spend weeks on. There seriously are so many fun ideas!

We had a car wash in our dramatic play area, a construction zone in our sensory bin, lots of transportation toys and fun matching games to try.

In fact, I have included a few free printable transportation activities that you are welcome to download and use with your children. Just scroll down and you will see the links under the related photos.

Setting Up the Transportation Theme in the Toddler and Preschool Classroom

Take a tour of our classroom and see the activities in this video:

In our dramatic play area, we set up a car wash complete with a coffee bar for our customers.

We hung banners on the ceiling and had different transportation clothes on our dress up cart.

A cardboard box and a plastic table cloth were our make-believe car wash. We even had tickets to hand out to our customers.

Our train table displayed some fun transportation toys, such as:

Melissa & Doug Service Station and Drive-Thru Car Wash

Melissa & Doug Car Carrier Truck

Lakeshore Block Play Garages

Lakeshore Pretend and Play Vehicles

On the floor we had the Melissa & Doug Round the City Rescue Rug.

I love to display books around the classroom, like this book called Old Tracks, New Tricks.

You can see how we use this book here.

We read several books, including Red Truck. (Scroll down to find 16 more favorite transportation books!)

I created a counting activity to go along with the book.

You can download the free printables here: Red Truck Counting Cards 1-10

I provided more transportation activities at our activity table, such as this car color matching idea.

You can download the free printables here: Car Color Matching Activity

I also created a wheels matching activity after reading the book What Do Wheels Do All Day?

I made 2 copies of each page and laminated both. I kept one copy as is, and cut apart the second copy. My preschoolers then matched the separated cards to those on the full pages.

You can download the free printables here: Wheels Matching Activity

Another fun activity for our transportation theme was a space rocket magnetic building set. It has a surprise astronaut inside, which thrilled my preschoolers!

We had a construction zone in our sensory table using kinetic sand and CAT mini machine construction vehicles.

By the way, if you haven’t felt kinetic sand yet, you must. It’s amazing!

You can read more about this activity here.

At our discovery table we had our Mix or Match Vehicles activity. Our preschoolers loved that they could mix a boat with a car!

One of our art activities involved driving different types of transportation vehicles through paint and then onto paper.

We then washed them in our water table with sponges.

Make sure to pop by my transportation pin board to find more fun ideas!

Here are our favorite books to go with the preschool transportation theme: