Vehicles and transport are often the centre of great interest from young children. If you’re keen to help your child learn, then they can also be used as a good starting point for early childhood education. Here are some ideas and inspiration for helping children learn about vehicles and transport.
Young children can be naturally inquisitive, wanting to know how things work, why things happen and what things do. Many young children are fascinated by vehicles and forms of transport, such as trucks, diggers, cars, trains, buses or aeroplanes. Without being sexist, transport and vehicles are something that may appeal in particular to young boys and, if they’re keen to know more about them, it’s a really good way of helping build their knowledge and education on all sorts of levels.
If they already enjoying playing with toy cars, trucks, fire engines, trains or other vehicles, and get excited when they see one go past, then now could be a good time to start learning more about them and building up learning at home.
Reading Books About Vehicles and Transport
There are lots of children’s books that use vehicles and transport as their theme, both fictional stories and non-fiction. Some of the best loved children’s books involve ‘talking’ trains, cars or diggers, which children love to read and have read to them.
Books are a great way of helping children learn about vehicles, how they work and what they’re used for. It’s also great to get children into reading before they go to school and, if you find a fictional transport-related series that they enjoy, there will be numerous books that you can borrow from a library or buy to read together at home. Plus, of course, many book series have spin-off TV series and other merchandise to add to their interest.
Going to See Vehicles and Transport in Action
A great way of learning more about how vehicles work is to go and see them in action. A simple visit to a train or bus station can provide hours of entertainment for a young child (even if it can be tiresome for parents!). You can watch the trains or buses arrive, see people get on, watch guards blowing the whistle for trains to leave and see the vehicles driving off.
This can help children learn about how bus or train stations work – how people use the transport to help them travel to work or go shopping, where people find out about which train or bus to catch and how everything works. It can provide a really good basic understanding of transport systems, as well as further a child’s interest in the vehicles themselves.
Learning Numbers With Vehicles and Transport
In the course of learning about vehicles and transport, there are lots of opportunities to learn counting and numbers too. If you’re out for a drive in your car, then try getting children to look out for certain vehicles – tractors in fields, buses or vans – or certain colours of vehicle, such as red, silver or blue and then counting how many they see on a journey.
You could also create transport charts for children to fill in, to keep a record of all the different types of vehicles they see over a longer period of time – the idea being, that they learn add to up and record these details, helping their number and counting skills in the process.
There are also numbers to be found on trains, planes and buses, as any train spotter can confirm, and looking out for these numbers could be fun for children too.
There are all sorts of ways in which you can help further a child’s understanding and knowledge, so be creative, have fun and develop your own fun learning processes!
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