Kindergarten Preschool Toddler
PrintablesMathScience
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Choo! Choo! All board the train to fun town! Our world is a vast and wonderful place with a plethora of ways to explore it. Many types of transportation make it easy to get from place to place and explore the different terrains available.
In this transportation sorting mat activity, you’ll find three printable sorting mats that will allow you to bring the world of transportation to life in your home or classroom.
Land, Air, & Water Transportation Sorting Mats
Before the kids get to create their worlds, there’s a bit of prep that needs to be done. In this transportation-themed printable, you’ll find a sorting mat for air, land, and water. You’ll also find four vehicles that belong to each mat.
The sorting mats and vehicles will need to be printed out and laminated for durability. Then, you’ll need to cut out all the vehicle cards and get ready to start sorting.
If you’d prefer to skip the cutting and laminating, this activity is also available as a set of digital task cards! These are perfect for extra practice or remote learning!
Sorting Modes of Transportation
Now that everything is ready to go, shuffle the stack of vehicle cards. If you are working with multiple children you may want to have a set for each child or have the children take turns selecting vehicle cards. They will utilize their problem-solving skills and visual memory to determine what each vehicle is and whether it belongs in the air, on land, or in the water.
This hands-on activity would be perfect for a transportation theme and is a wonderful way to introduce or strengthen the concept of classification. Also, as they pick up each card, they are also enhancing their fine motor skills.
Extend the Learning
After the kids have correctly matched each vehicle to their corresponding sorting mat, give them some time to imagine they are in the air gliding along in the hang-glider or sailing in the ocean on the sailboat. There’s nothing quite like the imagination of young children.
Transportation vehicles give us all a way to get around and explore the world in many different ways. Children may even be able to come up with complex scenarios, for example, my son’s boat shipwrecked and he had to use the raft to get to land. By the end of the activity, we not only strengthened his problem-solving skills, worked on classification and fine motor skills, but we were cracking up, too.
If your child is more tactile, consider grabbing some plastic transportation toys like cars, boats, and planes.
Have your child work their way through the toys, sorting them by land, air, and water so that they can build the connection between the toy vehicles and those that they might see in real life.
