18 Simple Transportation Activities for Preschoolers

Are you starting a fun transport theme with your kids, or are they just fascinated by the topic and want to learn more?

Here are 18 fun transportation activities for preschoolers, including ideas for art, music and movement, stories, maths, science and more!

Art Activities

Transport-themed art for preschoolers can easily be incorporated into any day. With common materials like paper plates, crayons, markers, construction paper, boards and glue, kids can “build” a variety of fun vehicles.

1. Painting and Molding with Toy Vehicles

Offer a variety of toy plastic vehicles that can easily be washed. Ask children to dip them into paint and then stamp, roll, or wheel them across large sheets of paper to create interesting tracks and designs.

A similar process can be followed by flattening clay or playdough on the table and then running the wheels of toy vehicles over the expanse to make tyre tracks.

2. Designing Clouds in the Sky

Begin with a backdrop of blue construction paper and airplanes drawn or cut and then glued. 

Encourage the young artists to create clouds with cotton balls, stretching and gluing them to the paper in various formations.

Music and Movement Activities

Songs, fingerplays, gross motor games, and other transport-themed movement activities for preschoolers naturally complement this theme.

3. Singing Old Favourites 

• Row, Row, Row Your Boat
• She’ll be Comin’ Round the Mountain
• The Wheels on the Bus
• Down by the Station
• The Ants Go Marching
• I’ve Been Working on the Railroad
• Yankee Doodle

4. Playing Red Light, Green Light

“Red Light, Green Light” is best played outdoors or in a large indoor space.

Set up the start and finish lines. When you say, “green light,” the children move away from “start” in the method you have chosen (run, walk, crawl, etc.) toward the finish line. They must stop when you say, “red light.” 

You can also include the yellow light as a signal for them to move more slowly.

For practice with colours and words, you can also use coloured and labelled “traffic lights” made from paper plates that you hold up alone or along with your verbal directions.

Literacy Activities

Try out these early literacy activities:

5. Sharing Books and Videos

Check your bookshelf, local library, and online for a wealth of fiction and non-fiction books and videos about various types of transport, from the common to the unusual.

Read, view, retell and discuss.

These titles are also available online:

Marvelous Motorcycles – Tony Mitton and Ant Parker

The Little Engine that Could – Watty Piper

Cars – Anne Rockwell

Sheep on a Ship – Nancy Shaw

6. Sequencing Practice

Offer practice with 1, 2, 3 order and transition words, like “first,” “next,” “then,” and “finally” through a retelling of a favourite story or book. 

This can be accomplished orally and/or with visuals, such as cut pictures or flannel board pieces.

Dramatic Play Activities

The transport preschool theme is a great partner with “playing pretend.” Offer a wide variety of props, dolls, huge boxes, puppets, dress-up clothes and furniture to help imaginations soar.

7. Pretending to Travel in Various Vehicles

Encourage kids to set up the play area with various furniture and props to look like the inside of a plane, boat, bus or train. 

8. Masquerading as a Vehicle!

Combining dramatic play with movement, children choose and act out their favourite kinds of vehicles. 

Safety and avoidance of bumping into other “vehicles” (teaching position in space) is encouraged and could be accomplished through the use of play traffic signs and signals.

Maths Activities

Transportation maths activities for preschoolers easily lend themselves to important skills, such as counting, operations, sorting, measurement, patterns, representation and geometry.

9. Sorting Vehicles

Challenge the children to sort toy vehicles by different characteristics: colour, size, shape, or mode of transport (air, land, or water).

They can also cut pictures of vehicles from magazines, and sort and glue them onto a transportation collage.

10. Recognizing Patterns

Beep Beep, Vroom Vroom! a “Math Start Book” by Stuart J. Murphy, encourages kids to see and recognize the patterns of colours and noises through the story’s vehicles.

11. Counting Vehicles

From a window, when outdoors, or even in a vehicle themselves, children can count how many they see of a particular vehicle: airplanes in the sky, skateboards on the sidewalk or trucks on the road.

12. Constructing a Graph

Graphing activities are a great way to introduce early maths concepts.

On poster board or large paper, draw a graph grid that is labelled with different colours. Children then add toy vehicles one at a time to discover which is the most common colour in the toy collection. 

Point out the numbers on the graph, count aloud to verify them, and help the children compare one to another.

Science Activities

Kids enjoy preschool transportation science activities without even realizing that they are “doing science.” 

13. Investigating Ramps

Using boards, blocks and toy cars, children build ramps to discover what placements and conditions make them roll down the fastest. 

This can also be accomplished outdoors on a larger scale with trikes/bikes and plywood or old doors.

14. Building and Flying Toy Airplanes

Provide a variety of materials, such as different types of paper, cardboard, balsa wood, and light foam sheets, and challenge the children to make airplanes.

Try flying them and then making small improvements. Discuss what helps the planes fly better and why they think that works.

Cooking Activities

Here are some cooking ideas to bring more fun to this theme.

15. Baking Traffic Light Cookies

Read Go! Go! Go! Stop! by Charise Mericle Harper as a fun way to talk about vehicles and how they often need to stop. 

Then have kids help bake your favourite sugar cookie recipe formed into rounds, colouring three containers of frosting to make red, yellow and green for traffic lights.

For a less sugary version, you can use crackers and cream cheese tinted in the three colours.

16. Cutting Fruits and Veggies into “Wheels”

With plastic knives, children cut bananas, oranges, kiwis, cucumbers, zucchini and cheese sticks into “wheels.” 

Full vehicles can be formed with the use of crackers, breads and other large veggie and fruit pieces.

Free Play Activities

Here are some final ways to incorporate this theme into children’s play.

17. Incorporating Vehicles

Make sure you have included a range of vehicles to be used in all areas of free play, indoors or outside. For example, add extra toy vehicles to the blocks and sand/mud areas, along with more kid-sized options of ride-on vehicles.

18. Adding Books to your Shelves

Many kids choose to “read” and browse through books during free play. Be certain that you have plenty of books handy, both fiction and non-fiction, that focus on a wide range of transportation topics.

Transport activities for early years expand children’s horizons and build their foundations of knowledge for future learning. 

There are no limits, and they can travel to space in a rocket ship or to the bottom of the sea in a submarine!

Here are lots more preschool themes your kids will love.