I have been getting a lot of mileage out of match box cars. (pun intended) The enthusiasm still seems strong and with limited materials for my concrete thinkers, I go as long as possible. I blogged a long time ago about a cars and maps activity I used in my Kindergarten Concept Groups. If you want to look it up it was written in Sept 2009 for concept group #2. I have updated this map over the last few years so that it now looks like this.
I have students select match box cars. We run through the course a couple of times using prepositions; start, across the tracks, turn the corner, over the bridge, through the tunnel, between the grass and at the finish. I then bring out a spinner that doesn’t go above the number 4. We work on turn taking, number concepts, and telling where their car is using a preposition. Depending on the positions of the cars you may also elicit 1st, beside, before, after and behind. For some reason, they always want to run the track backwards so they get a 2nd repetition on the return.
I have continued to make some updates and add resources when I found them. There are free animal alphabet cards on TPT from Jason’s Online Classroom. (Update: sorry they are no longer free but they are still there) In my concept activity number 12 you needed alphabet cards to cut in half. I think these would work great. Look in the Vocabulary section of this site under Half/Whole for the direct link.
