We recently read the Little Blue Truck
and Little Blue Truck Leads the Way
. these books are such favorites, I decided to use the book for some learning activities.
Little Blue Truck Phonics & Reading
Bear {4 yrs, 4 mon} has shown interest in learning how to read. Of course, I’m grabbing his opportunity and enthusiasm and running with it. We’ve been working on sounding words out and word endings such as -at, -et, -ig, and -ar. {More on how we’re doing this in a few days} I made up some word cards of three-letter words that have these endings. I used business cards cut in half just because I had a lot of them.
In The Little Blue Truck Leads the Way, the little truck is delivering some kind of green vegetable to a business in the city. So we filled a little blue matchbox truck up with 2 spot green legos to represent the vegetables. then it was up to Bear to “deliver” them to the appropriate “business” {card}.
I laid out 5 different cards, some with the same beginning letter, some with the same ending sound. I pretended to call Bear and ordered some vegetables to be delivered to the dig restaurant, for example. Then he went card by card and sounded out the words until he found the right one.
Little Blue Truck Math & Problem-Solving
In The Little Blue Truck Leads the Way, the truck gets stuck in a traffic jam where all the vehicles are struggling to get through. So we played a Little Blue Truck version of Rush Hour, Jr. game. The goal of the game is usually to get the ice cream truck out of the board. We switched it out with the blue truck game piece. Not only did this extend the book, but it refreshed a game that we’ve had for awhile.
Little Blue Truck Art
For art, we did the classic painting with cars and trucks. After digging through the 300-some matchbox cards, we found vehicles that corresponded as close as we could to the vehicles in the book.
I laid it a long piece of easel paper on the floor with a shower curtain under to protect the floor. Bear picked out the colors of paint he wanted to use and poured them on paper plates. After rolling the cars and trucks in the paint, he used them to create tracks on the paper.
I love using books as a basis for learning units because they often have so many images and ideas to expand on. The Little Blue Truck Leads the Way is just another great example of how the story doesn’t have to end when you close the book 🙂
Don’t forget to check out More Little Blue Truck activities here.
We love these books at our house, too. Love the activities to go along with them!
I love the truck delivering the vegetables to the cards! Such a cute way to practice reading!
We love The Little Blue Truck around here, too. The kiddo is looking over my shoulder and wants to try all the activities. Thanks for sharing them!
We love these books too! They have been favorites of my 2 year-old for the past year.
We love these books, too! Thanks for sharing these creative activities!
The phonics/ reading activity is too cute! I've had The Little Blue Truck on my Amazon wishlist– need to get it! Thanks for sharing!!