Painting with Trucks

This week we took advantage of the good weather and got outside to try something I’ve been wanting to do for quite a while now.  It was a huge hit with both my daughter and son.

What was it?  Painting with toy trucks!  (You may also like our painting with flowers activity.)

Materials needed to paint with toy trucks:

• Toy trucks  (We chose ones with interesting tire patterns.)
• Acrylic paint
• Shallow container to put paint in
• Thick paper  (Very thin paper may rip during the activity.)
• Tape

This activity can get messy, so we took it outside.

I started by taping the corners of the paper to the picnic table.   (I recycled some brown packing paper for our first activity.)   Then I put several colors of paint onto our “paint pallets” (A.K.A. frisbees).

They had fun running the trucks around in the paint to coat the tires.

Then it was time to drive!

The tires left tread marks wherever they pushed the toy trucks.

It was neat to see the different patterns that each truck left.

Once they had painted with the trucks for a while, we decided to try something different.

I taped some large pieces of thick craft paper onto our slide.

After making sure the tires were covered in paint, they let them go down the slide.  They loved seeing the trucks zoom down the slide, leaving their mark behind!

My son couldn’t resist doing a few truck races this way.

Oh, and when a couple turned sideways and got stuck?  He had a blast making a colorful traffic jam on the slide.

Painting with trucks was a huge hit.  The paintings are so bright and colorful that we made special homemade picture frames for them so we can hang them up in the play area.

You may also like:

• Vehicle Crafts and Activities — Vehicle activities for each letter of the alphabet and more
• Vowel Farm — A fun hands on activity to work on vowel recognition
• Cardboard Tube Marble Run — Simple STEM activity