Fun learning through vehicles

(Goblin is 24 months)

I could tell today was going to be a vehicle based day when Goblin refused to choose between his lorry t-shirt and his cement mixer t-shirt and instead insisted on wearing both, one on top of the other. To be honest I was just glad he decided to wear real clothes, last week I ended up taking him shopping in his pyjamas (you can see his delight in last weeks {this moment} photo).

Goblin instigated our first activity, which I always find preferable to me suggesting something. He brought me the pack of Usborne digger and truck snap from his shelves (a very successful birthday present from Bubble's mum). He hasn't grasped the rules of snap yet so instead I lay out one of all the different vehicles. Then I go through the pack and ask Goblin to point to the right card to match the one in the pack. There are 4 of each card making 48 in total. He played this until we were two thirds of the way through the pack without getting bored. That is a fair amount of time on one activity. I'm also really impressed that he can match with so many options. I love it when he stops and thinks and you can see him scanning the cards to find the right one. 

 Another fantastic birthday gift, this time from Nanny, was the Melissa and Doug sound block puzzle. The cubes have 6 different vehicle pictures on them. If you match up the picture correctly and put them in the base they make the sound of the vehicle in the picture. It has taken Goblin a couple of days to work out that the picture has to be correct, and not just contain the two correct bits of the vehicle but facing in the wrong directions. 

 But now he seems to have grasped it and is continuously delighted when he sets off the fire engine sirens. There are so many skills at play here, manipulation, observation, matching (of sorts).

 We took a break to read his new tractor book that I picked up in our bargain book store. It has about 5 pictures of tractors on every page. Goblin was in ecstasy. And what's really great is that the different tractor brands tend to be different colours, so John Deere make green tractors with yellow wheels, the Landini seem to be mainly blue, and McCormick seem to be red. Which meant we got a chance to talk about colours. Goblin is still not able to recognise colours consistently (actually everything is blue at the moment, although he did say some of the tractors were purple - None of the tractors are purple!) so I take every opportunity to tell him what colour things are. 

Finally we went for a walk to the train station to do some train spotting, and on the way we went through the car park and I pointed out all the colours of the different cars, and Goblin pointed out the buses, vans and pick up trucks he saw. He is quite good at distinguishing between vans, pickups and 4x4s. I wonder whether that skill will be useful in later life.