Welcome to our Cars and Vehicles adventure! In this post, you will see which books we used in our play time as inspiration to create a play dough city for our cars and vehicles.
It was so fun!
Be sure and grab your free printable templates so you and your little ones can create your own awesome play car games!
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Let’s Read!
What inspired us to make our own play dough city was this book: “If I Built a Car.” It is so fun to read! This book is a great rhyming book.
Children love to listen to rhymes and how stories are told in a sing-songy way. Look at the illustrations. Aren’t they inviting and amazing?
I love all the colors and design of the car the boy built in the story.
As props, we used the awesome On the Road Toob! These are quality manipulatives that are professionally sculpted and finely hand painted.
For your peace of mind, they are phthalate-free and thoroughly safety tested to safeguard your child’s health.
In the On the Road Toob, you get the following: police car, delivery truck, fire truck, school bus, pick-up truck, sports car, motorcycle, ATV and semi-truck.
As Brother and I took turns reading “If I Built a Car,“ we loved how the character in the story was so much with Brother. We giggled as we found similarities between the boy in the book and him.
Meanwhile, Sister was playing with our super fun On the Road Toob. She was quiet and listening to the story. It was great handing her these miniature vehicles because she listens better when she is doing something with her hands.
Play Cars Games
Now, for the fun part! In honor of Play Dough Day in September, I created ten fun templates with roads and parking lots, parks and other areas so we could take our imagination and creativity to the limit with our creations.
The point of the game was to create buildings, homes, plants, bodies of water and anything else you would have in a community out of nothing other than play dough.
I printed all ten templates in color. They are supposed to be black, but just for fun, I printed some in “draft” form so the roads printed in a light blue color and I printed others in the “best quality” setting.
This turned out dark black. Sister loved the light blue roads and Brother liked the black roads best.
After printing them, I laminated each sheet using a thermal laminator. That way, you can use play dough build the city and wipe off easily.
I used the foamy double-sided tape to create the bridges.
They are easy to move around. To make it even more ornate or detailed, you could also use dry erase markers and dry erase crayons to draw on your city and easily wipe off clean when done.
Let’s Play Some More!
We took a little break from our play dough play to work on a truly fantastic sticker book about cars that we have been enjoying. It is called the Usborne “First Sticker Book: Cars.”
You can also see it here. It is less than $7.00 and it is filled with colorful images of real-life situations involving cars and other vehicles. Children get to add the stickers on pages as they see fit.
The pages and the stickers are made out of very compatible materials where the stickers and be removed and be placed elsewhere on the page without damaging the page or tearing the sticker.
It is so fun to use these sticker books over and over. They play endlessly with them as they learn.
Look at this page! Sister loved placing the car stickers on the road. She eventually realized that the card weren’t facing the same direction and said that she needed to help them move so they “don’t crash.”
She easily peeled the stickers off and moved them to make sure all the vehicles were facing the right direction.
And now we are back to playing with our play dough city. They asked if they could come back to the table to play some more.
And so we did! They created buildings, stores, trees, lakes and rivers, bridges, cairnes for hikers and so much more!
I hope you enjoyed this post and get your free printable templates so you are your little ones can create your own play dough city together!
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Kristina @ School Time Snippets says
We’ve read, “If I Built A Car” too and it is a great book! What a fun go along activity!
Amanda @artsy_momma says
You always have the cutest-sounding books! 🙂
tracey says
is it not free any more?