I've been a little slow in getting this up, but here are some of the books we used during our T is for Truck preschool unit. It mostly became an overall transportation unit. We read a lot of books, but these are the ones we liked the best. Hope you like them too.

Freight Train

The pictures in this book are beautiful. It goes through each car on the train and shows them all in different colors. Then the train goes zooming through tunnels and over ravines, through the day and the night. It has very few words and is great for reading together.

Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus
This may be a stretch for a transportation book, but who can resist the urge to read a Mo Willems book? The pigeon wants to drive the bus, but the bus driver has asked the reader to keep an eye on things. It's fun for the kids to get to tell the pigeon no over and over. You gotta love that pigeon. One of my favorite things about the pigeon books is the opportunity to read with so much expression. Reading with expression makes a decent reader a great reader.

Red Truck
This is a little board book about a little red tow truck that is able to make it through all of the snow and mud when other trucks can't.It's a short, cute book.

The Little Engine That Could
This is a classic story that every child should read. The train carrying food and toys breaks down before it can take its load to all the children on the other side of the hill. The big fancy engines won't help, but the little blue engine helps the train over the hill, all the while chanting "I think I can."

Away We Go
This was a great board book for learning about shapes. There are cutouts in the pages connecting the pictures throughout the book. We used this book with our foam shapes activity where we made cars, trucks and rockets out of different shapes. Very few words, but lots of colors and shapes.

Trucks Whizz! Zoom! Rumble! and Trains Steaming! Pulling! Huffing!
These were both great books showing different trucks and trains doing there jobs. We loved all of the pictures. There was so much going on to talk about.

Let's Go For a Drive
Another wonderful Mo Willems Elephant and Piggie book! Elephant and Piggie decide to go for a drive, but they need to gather everything they need. Once they have the map, sunglasses, umbrellas, and suitcases they are ready to go, until they realize they have no car for their drive. Sweet Girl loves this book. She has most of it memorized and can "read" it to me.

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Our second preschool unit was T is for Truck. But we expanded to include cars and trains too. I guess you could call it T is for Transportation. I don't know a lot about cars and trucks, but we still managed to have a great time learning about them and playing with them. We spent two weeks on this unit, and still didn't get to everything I wanted to do.

Math Activities

• Truck Sorting- Gather a collection of cars and trucks and sort them in different ways. We sorted by color.
• Pattern Block Pictures- We used these Melissa and Doug pattern blocks to make pictures of different types of transportation. Some pictures came in the set with the blocks, but you can print your own pictures for free from Prekinders.
• Delivery Truck- Sweet Girl picked a number card and then counted and loaded that many blocks onto the delivery truck and drove them to the "construction site."
• Color Delivery Truck- We used the same delivery truck, but this time we were delivering colored blocks. I laid out colored pieces of construction paper, and then gave  Sweet Girl some Megablocks to load on the truck and deliver to the matching color of construction paper. 
• Foam Shape Blocks- I cut shapes out of foam and gave them to Sweet Girl to make cars and trucks out of. She surprised me by designing her own rocket.
• Truck Measuring- We used unifix cubes to measure different cars and trucks and then compare their length.
• Truck Graphing- We sorted the cars once again by color, and then lined them up to form a bar graph. 

Literacy Activities

• T Writing- We started the unit by practicing the sound that T makes and by writing upper and lower case Ts.
• Car Lacing Cards- I printed off these free car lacing cards from Busy Little Bugs.IT's not exactly writing, but it's still good for developing fine motor skills.
• Transportation Word Spelling- I downloaded these transportation words . Sweet girl used letter tiles to spell the transportation words.
• Name Train- I cut out "train cars" and wrote the letters of the names for each member of our family. Then Sweet Girl lined up the cars to spell each of our names.
• Truck Letters- We lined up our toy cars and trucks to form letters.
• Letter Wheels- I cut out wheels for our car and wrote upper case and lower case letters on them. Sweet Girl had to match up the letters and put them on the car. 

Other Activities

• Stoplight- We made a stoplight out of construction paper. I traced the circles for the lights, and then let Sweet Girl cut them out.
• Red Light Green Light- We played red light, green light with the stoplight we made.
• Singing- We sang songs like "The Wheels on the Bus."
• Playdough Tracks- We drove a monster truck toy through playdough to make track marks. A side note, we had to push a lot harder than I thought we would to be able to make any tracks.
• Tire Track Painting- We did a similar activity the next day when we drove the truck through paint and then drove it onto paper to create a really awesome textured picture.
• Sidewalk Chalk Roads- We drew a set of roads and a town on the sidewalk and then drove our cars around town.
• Building Ramps- We experimented with building ramps and their steepness and rolling our trucks down. We ended up sending them down our fold up slide.
• Car wash Sensory Bin- This one we didn't get to, and I was really bummed. I thought it would be a lot of fun. The plan was to fill a bin with soapy water and sponges and wash our toy cars.

Finally to wrap up our truck unit we had a pizza movie party where we watched Disney's Cars. Sweet Girl had never seen it before, and it was a major hit. We had so much fun. Now onto the next unit.

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