To me, a tape road is a no-brainer simple activity to do.
With all boys in the house, we’re always doing ‘things that go‘. And roads are built constantly. Whether it’s from train tracks, drawing roads, making roads from blocks… there always seems to be roads involved.
This is such a simple activity, there’s really nothing to it. Using painter’s tape (the best I’ve found for wood floors… the tape for delicate surface (affiliate link) works the best. Test on your floor first before taping it all up!), I marked out a road that went through our entire downstairs.
I put down lines of tape to make roads throughout the entire downstairs.
The road went through rooms, made intersections, went around rugs and under tables.
In previous years, I’ve made a bigger road, so ride-on toys could fit between the lines (see below).
This time, I decided to make it smaller to get the kids crawling around and thinking more imaginatively then just speeding through the house as fast as they could.
We did do a little learning game with it, unsuccessfully. Louis was not in the mood. The tape roads are still up, so I may try that again with him another day.
For now, the boys are just enjoying driving along the tape road, here and there, throughout the day.
Henry and George’s larger tape road
Making a large tape road for the boys to ride through in the house was much needed. It was a day that they needed to get rid of some of their extreme amount of energy and get moving.
The boys have a ‘Super Cycle‘ (affiliate link) -Big Wheels- left in the house from a Christmas present (thankfully now that its warming up, that’s going outside!), and a ride-on fire truck (affiliate link) If you have boys – especially – I’m sure you have some sort of ride on toys too. They used that to ride through the road I made.
Other things could be used too if you don’t have ride on toys in the house (I’m lucky and have a pretty big house that we do keep some inside), but we’ve done roads using dump trucks and tractors too. So whatever ‘vehicle’ you have to push through the tape road would work too!
I added little squares of red and yellow to intersections (yep, we had intersections and crossings all over). They were intended to be stop signs and yields.
The boys didn’t quite grasp what that meant. They still used them in their play, but it wasn’t quite ‘road legal’ and correct. Oh well! It added an extra bit of fun for them and helped with their pretend play.
They made the loop many times around the tape road track. Burning off some of the energy. It was a little crazy for a bit, but totally worth hearing their giggles as they were racing through it.
It was especially nice to see one stop at one of the ‘signs’ to let the other one go. It didn’t always happen that way, but it was a nice break from the usual ‘I have to be first!’ that I hear all the time.
George insisted he help with cleaning up the tape when we were done. Which was fine by me! I usually encourage it as part of the activities. It was a great fine motor activity for him too, peeling up all the pieces of tape…
Another simple activity George and I did recently is with water. So simple, but definitely fun and worth doing!
Simple Activity: A Tape Road on handsonaswegrow.com
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