Kids and toy cars are like two peas in a pod. You simply cannot keep the two apart for a long time. We mean think of your own childhood and how proud you were of your toy truck collection. Nobody was allowed to touch it without your permission!
Well, that said, the good thing is you can use your kid’s fascination for all things on-wheels this World Sustainable Transport Day!
How, you ask? To teach them all about vehicles! Celebrated on 26th November by the UN General Assembly, this day is driven (pun intended!) to spread awareness about sustainable mobility options and how they can benefit the world.
Now whether you are a mom or a dad or a teacher, these activities can help you get your preschooler excited about World Public Transport Day!
- Get kids talking about their commute
- Create vehicle art
- Make clouds in the sky
- Or paper planes
- Play vehicle based music
- Row, Row, Row Your Boat
- Yankee Doodle Went To Town
- A Sailor went to Sea
- Down at the Station
- I’m an Airplane
- Play transport related games
- Read transport based stories
- Freight Train by Donald Crews
- Planes by Byron Barton
- Cars by Anne Rockwell
- Sheep in a Jeep by Nancy Shaw
- Marvellous Motorcycles by Tony Mitton and Ant Parker
- Do a play
- Have make-believe sessions
- Sound class
- Bake a cookie
- Count the cars
Letting kids get chatty about how they get to school everyday will help them get a first-hand understanding of how different or similar their modes of commute are! And as you know understanding sparks curiosity further. So kids are bound to feel like knowing more about the fascinating worlds of cabs, autos, trams, metros, buses and more! All you have to do is just get the ‘wheel’ rolling.
Got a set of plastic cars just lying around? Get your kids to dip them in tubs of washable paint of different colours so they can stamp their designs on craft paper! You can even ask them to roll these paint-dripped cars on large-sized paper sheets, creating a bunch of colourful tracks and designs!
If you do not have washable, plastic cars, you can use that old bucket of play dough you had stacked somewhere and forgotten all about!
Confused? Think aeroplanes!
Sure they are not part of anyone’s daily commute, really. But they are still very much a form of public transport! So why not fuel that little pilot’s curiosity a little bit further with this simple exercise this World Public or Sustainable Transport Day?
Stick a wide piece of blue construction paper on a wall, and cut out white tufts of cotton to use as clouds of different shapes and sizes. You can even get kids to colour and cut out their drawings of aeroplanes, jets and more, which they can stick on the construction paper.
This is probably the easiest transport day celebration activity you will ever find! After all, who has not made paper planes in their lives?!
If you want to make things a little interesting, you can divide kids into groups and give each group a different coloured paper to work with. Then you can hang up all the paper planes via strings near a window and let the kids watch them fly with the breeze!
How about making song and dance a part of your transport day celebrations, eh? There are just so, so many kindergarten songs and rhymes that feature vehicles in their titles that would be apt to play about right now!
Think:
And there are so many more! You can play these during class hours and have a little dance routine with the kids. That ought to get them into the spirit of the day!
Remember the game ‘Red Light, Green Light’ that you used to play as kids? It is time to pass down that torch to this generation of preschoolers!
A simple enough game that syncs perfectly with transport awareness day, you can use this game to teach kids about the importance of following traffic rules. Just ask kids to walk or run when you say ‘green light’ and to stop when you say ‘red light’. Those who do not follow the rules will be out of the game.
God knows kids love a good story time! One of the best ways you can conduct transport day celebrations in your preschool is to have a reading session. The catch? The stories should only and only be about vehicles! Sample these books and stories if you do not know where to start:
Of course you can pick any other book too, as long as your preschoolers love it!
Since you already have a solid recommendation of books (thanks to us!), what better way to host transport day celebrations in preschool than by doing a play on one of them?
You could assign each kid in class a vehicle to dress up as and give them lines that talk about the lives of these transports in sea, on the road or high up in the air.
We love make-believe sessions as they really unlock kids’ imaginations and take them to the next level! For transport awareness day, you can again assign each kid a vehicle and ask them to write a short paragraph where they imagine travelling in the said vehicle. Ask them to be as vivid as they can be with their descriptions.
Preschool is such a great time to teach kids about the different sounds different things make. So why should transports be left far behind? From the vroom vroom of a motorbike to the tring tring of a bicycle bell, there are a lot of fun sounds for kids to explore and learn all about! You can even take this chance to teach about related words such as rumbling, screeching, droning, rattling and more.
How about a little cooking to observe this all important day? Bake a batch of round cookies in class and ask kids to colour them in the shades of traffic lights with frosting or food-safe colouring. Once they are done, they can enjoy the cookies as a little midday treat for all of their hard work!
However, if cookies are not an option, you can even get round-ish veggies and encourage kids to cut little wheels out of them with plastic knives. You can even get a pack of crackers and ask kids to make full vehicles out of them!
Finally, the simplest way to have transport day celebrations in your preschool is here. Everyday we see multiple cars, cabs, trucks, trams and what not pass us by. Have your kids hang around the windows of your classroom that have a wide view of the street. And ask kids to label and count the different types of transportation they see.
You can make World Public Transport a very exciting and educational experience for your kids by trying a fun mix of any of the activities listed above. At EuroKids, we are always busy coming up with fun ways to educate our preschoolers about our big and fascinating world! If you want to know how we do what we do best, be sure to visit us!
