Paper road car track adventures

What you need

• Large piece of paper taped to the floor or a large piece of cardboard from a box
• a marker/s to draw your road/track
• some toy cars or other vehicles

Benefits

Young children’s early imaginative play begins with things they are very familiar with. Seeing cars driving around on the road is something all children will have seen before, and their early language in play will be based on these experiences. Even young babies will start to say ‘brrrrrrmmmm’ when pushing a toy car around, and this is a really important part of developing language through play.

The experience

You can get creative ahead of playing with your child, drawing a road or car track onto your paper/cardboard. You may like to add green grass, a river, lake, houses - you could create your own entire city!

If your child is older they may like to join you in drawing and colouring different parts of the scene.

Provide some toy cars and enjoy having fun as you play alongside your child. Use lots of language as you play, talking about and narrating what you are doing, e.g. ‘my car is driving on the road, oh no, there’s another car! Beep beep!’ Make lots of noises your child will imitate such as ‘brrmm’ or ‘beep’. Let your child play freely with the cars, enjoying rolling them around, perhaps experimenting with how fast they can make them go!