A couple of weeks ago I brought home a new set of construction vehicle toys for Calvin and he was totally into them. I had been in kind of a rut with planning Tot School themes, so I decided to run with his newfound interest. Here are some fun construction-ish themed activities we did!

When we first got the trucks, we did not yet have sand, and I didn’t want Calvin to dig up the lovely new lawn that his dad just planted this spring, so instead I pulled out our rainbow rice to make a colorful construction site!

The next day we made a trip to Home Depot for some play sand and Calvin had fun making his little dump trucks and excavators work hard at pushing the sand around. Henry had fun grabbing handfuls of sand and sprinkling it around all over the place. And he only put a little of it into his mouth… I think. 😉

I scoured our bookshelf for books with construction stuff, and came up with our Busytown book and this awesome shine-a-light book from Usborne books (no affiliation) where you hold the pages up to the light to see hidden things!

We did a couple of hammering activities for motor skills and for fun! Stamp hammering was a fun way to mix in some alphabet practice with our theme.

This hammer splatter painting was so much fun and we got a gorgeous piece of kid-made splatter art out of it! It was inspired by that “Candy Crush” conversation heart hammering game that we did back around Valentine’s Day. For this paint activity, I mixed up a few colors and poured little dots of paint all over our rolled out paper, then Calvin took his toy hammer and hammered away!

There’s a short video of him doing this hammer splatter painting on our Instagram and Facebook pages (apparently I would have to upgrade my WordPress account to a paid account if I want to put videos here on the blog… so I’m gonna leave the videos to IG and FB).

More painting, with the construction vehicles this time! That is brown tempera paint which I mixed up, and it looks exactly like chocolate pudding which, as a friend of mine suggested, would make a yummy and taste-safe art project. Calvin had fun with this, in fact he had so much fun, he actually wore through the paper and we ended up painting the table instead! Oh well, it’s all washable paint!! For clean up, I had Calvin take all his trucks to the sink and give them a bath. He got a kick out of that 🙂

Then I realized that with all the painting and playing with rice and sand we were doing we hadn’t actually built anything. So we put the construction trucks to work with some Duplos.

I love that one little set of construction trucks inspired so much fun! What activities would you add?