How to Have a Cars-Themed Day for Kids

Whether you run your own small child care center, home school your children, or just enjoy coming up with new ways to amuse and inspire your youngsters, having "theme days" or "theme weeks" is always a lot of fun!

One of my favorite themes is "Cars", because there is so much you can do with it! Here are some of the things I did with my 5-year-old when we had our "Cars" week.

Wheel Painting: You'll need paper, poster paint, paint brushes, and some toy cars with working wheels. Have kids splatter paint on their sheets of paper. They can then drive the toy cars through the paint, and make interesting tire tracks all over their papers.

After doing this project, it's a good time to have your own Car Wash!

For a variation of this, or as an additional activity, let the kids drive their toy cars through other substances, such as playdough, flour, shaving cream, etc.

Car Wash: You'll need a container of soapy water, and sponges or wash rags. If you have a sensory box or sensory table, that would be a good place to have your car wash! Take the cars that are full of paint from Wheel Painting, and let the kids wash them off. They can also wash other dirty toy cars that have been used in the sand box or the back yard.

Red-Light-Green-Light: Remember this old game? Here's an even more fun way to play it. Cut out a red circle and a green circle from colored paper. Instead of saying, "Red Light," and "Green Light," the person who's It can simply hold up the red circle or the green circle.

Make Your Own Cars: Use large cardboard boxes to design your own cars. Kids can sit in them and pretend to drive.

License to drive: Let kids make their own driver's licenses, by pasting small photos of themselves on index cards, then writing their names, addresses and birthdays on the cards. (Smaller kids will need you to help with the writing! Or, have them simply write their names, or scribble, on the cards.) You might want to cover the cards with contact paper to laminate them and make them last longer!

Traffic Light Snack: You'll need graham crackers, some sort of frosting, and M&M's. Use the frosting to stick red, yellow and green M&M's onto graham cracker rectangles.

Driver's Ed: Kids can use chalk to turn a driveway or sidewalk into a road. You can make lanes of traffic, street signs, and more. Then, they can ride their bicycles up and down the road, pretending to be in cars!

To make the game even more realistic, teach the kids how to do manual turn signals with their arms.

Road Trip: Let the kids accompany you on a trip to the automatic car wash!

More ideas: Visit the library and check out books about cars.

Take a walk through a local car sales lot, and pick out your favorite types of cars.

Have your own "car wash" at home, and let the kids use large sponges and car detergent to wash their bicycles. Or, have them help you wash your own car!

If you live near one of those old-fashioned drive-in restaurants, like Sonic, have lunch or dinner there, and eat in the car!

Go to a drive-in movie.

Provide some new toy cars (you can get them at the dollar store) for kids to play with on their own.

Whether you pick a few of these ideas and have a car day, or do them all throughout the course of a week or two, you and the kids in your life are certain to have a great time!