truck paint

M loves vehicles of all kinds - cars, trucks, buses, trains, etc.  As I've mentioned here before, he also loves painting.  We combined the two today, as seen on a number of blogs I've looked at over the past year.

We started with M choosing the colors he wanted to use.  We're working on color names so it makes for good practice.  He chose five colors today and I put them on the paper in globs.  M dove right in.  In fact, the activity was really half truck and half finger painting for us.

After I showed him how to use the trucks to make tracks he got into it.  I put out two trucks that I knew would be easily cleaned off.  A lot of our other trucks were too big or were matchbox type so I thought they'd be more difficult to clean off.  These worked great but only gave us one type of tracks...

Our final project was a mix of finger paint smears and tire tracks.  

I imagine it would be a fun thing to do with plastic animals if you could find some with distinctive footprints.  M liked it but it ended up being kind of a quick activity.  I think if we had had more vehicles or animals or toys to make different tracks it would have lasted longer.  We did end up doing two sheets and then had fun giving the trucks a bath :)

hot wheels lamp

I've needed a lamp for M's room for a while but I haven't been able to find anything just right.  His room started with a bear theme.  As he's accumulated more stuff it's turned into a bear room with trains and sports and dogs and all kinds of other boy things.  At first I was looking for something that either had a bear on it or went with the mostly red/brown/beige colors in his room.  I widened my search and still didn't find anything I liked so I turned to Pinterest.  I've been trying a lot of DIY ideas from Pinterest lately and found some cute lamp ideas.  I decided to go with this one since M loves trucks and cars.  This would be an awesome project to do with a boy in first or second grade as a fun measuring activity.  I did our version slightly different from the original:

I went to Target and bought the lamp with the black shade and the matchbox cars.  We had some yellow felt left over from our felt board project.

I cut the yellow felt into one-inch strips and placed them one-inch apart on the lamp shade.  Our lamp shade was 28-inches around.  I attached them with hot glue.  

The cars were more difficult to attach.  At first I put hot glue on each wheel and stuck them on.  It didn't hold so I tried coating the whole bottom of the car in hot glue.  I held each car on for about a minute.  This seemed to work well.  There was one orange race car with a thin bottom that was more difficult than the others but eventually it stayed.  

I realize our blog has been missing a lot of "activity" type posts lately.  I have a few things planned that we'll try and share here soon.  But I love these projects and want to share them too!