Paint Chip School Bus

We're having some friends over later this week to do more Camp Mom "Things that go" activities and crafts. When I was checking out paint colors for our garage at Lowes tonight, I came up with this idea... Paint Chip Vehicles. 

This school bus was my first attempt... I'll see how the little guy likes this idea tomorrow.

I grabbed red, blue, and yellow paint chips because I'm envisioning a fire truck, police car, and taxi cab... in addition to the school bus. I think my little guy is going to want to make the fire truck first thing in the morning! If it ends up being fun, maybe we'll try it with our friends.

Materials Needed: paint chip (these are the Valspar ones... I liked them because they have windows :)), photos of faces (or magazine cut outs of people's faces), Sharpie, pencil, tape, scissors, small piece of red cardstock, and felt floor protectors (they're always falling off our chairs... so I figured this could be a way to re-use them?).

Directions:

1. Prep-ahead: Use the pencil to draw the front of the bus and then cut it out.

2. Turn the chip around and tape the face pictures in each window.

3. Add some extra details with a Sharpie. I added doors. For my little guy, I will have strips of black paper for him to glue on for doors.

4. Stick on two felt floor protector for the wheels.

5. Tape on a little stop sign. I'll have those pre-cut for my little guy as well.

And then let your bus go driving!! You could also attach a popsicle stick to the back to help it move even faster! 🙂

We'll be doing this craft along with reading our favorite bus book, Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus by Mo Willems. 

Skills that can be embedded into this activity:

- shape recognition (talk about square windows, circle wheels, and hexagon stop signs)

- safety signs (learn to recognize the word STOP and talk about what it means)

- letter recognition (talk about the letters that you see in the word STOP and on the side of the bus- SCHOOL)

- use phrases and sentences to describe the people you see in the bus- how do they feel, where are they going, who are they, what are they doing on the bus, etc.