Tape Town: a quick, easy, cheap way to create roads for toy cars

My sons loves driving their cars round and round the room. One day I decided to use tape to give them some roads to drive on. B spends so much time making up stories that I wanted to give him a stage for his police vehicles, trucks and buses. It was a huge success and we all had lots of fun with it.

We started with just one road marked on the floor with masking tape. Then we created a ‘T’ junction and then just kept on building across the room. B enjoyed going around with his bus. He stopped in the same place every time for the bus stop - people got on, people got off. Eventually he asked for the tape to mark the stopping place.

We chose a place for a farm so that little R had a place to play too. He likes to drive cars but has no regard for the rules and regulations of the road. He often crawls across the whole set up. B has to wait for ‘the pedestrian crossing the road’ (not always an easy task). Sometimes we build a little train track at one end of our town.
Traffic lights, police stations, fire station, a house with a garden - the additions go on and on. We create different stories every time. The main characters are usually the bus or the police car. B seems to choose depending on his mood. When he has a lot of energy to use up, the police car zooms around with the siren on full blast. There can be a lot of destruction and the noise reaches real siren levels.

At other times the bus drives very carefully around the town. B brings the bus slowly to the stops making sure the tyres are right at the edge of the road. He talks about people getting on and off with prams and dogs. Somebody might be running for the bus so he waits for them - or not!

More Painting with Cars

Our first painting with cars activity was a brilliant success. B added more and more paint to the masterpiece each time we came back to it and discovered new ways to move the cars, the paint and himself. It was also a great way to explore colours. Just before we washed the plasic canvas, we went a little crazy with the paint.

On this day, he chose red and green paint. As we sat down with our equipment - paint, cars and plasic sheet - I asked spontaneously: would you like to sqeeze the paint bottle? Well, of course yes. Normally I do that part, but I thought it would be a nice change for him and I was right.

The Big Squeeze of Paint

It was lovely to see him so focussed on getting paint out, and I was so busy taking photos, that I forgot to say stop! 

We ended up with a huge blob of red paint which he drowned his cars in.

Car completely covered in paint

Some wonderful tracks made by cars

Often, he doesn’t like to get too messy, but once all his cars were drenched, and his hands covered, and after he slipped and we laughed so much, he didn’t seem to mind. 

The big blue bus always gets a look in

A terrible accident? Only with a bottle of paint

And then it was time for a slide

The clean up was a family effort. We carried all paint covered items, including a messy toddler, outside to be cleaned off with hot soapy water. And so the fun continued. It took a while, but soon everything was clean enough, and B dry enough to come inside to hunt for footprints and dots of red paint on the floor. With a wet wipe in hand he managed to remove most of it. (Aren’t  wet wipes fantastic for this sort of thing?) The activity took up the whole morning and we were more than ready for a long midday rest.

B had a wonderful time painting with his favourite toys and built on the skills he had started when we first did this activity. I hope that he was able to connect his ideas and stories as we didn't clean his 'canvas' between sessions.