ABC Car Game to easily teach letters

My toddler and I came up with a game to learn the alphabet that we really like. It involves the things he loves most, cars, and it is helping him learn his ABC’s. We call it, the ABC Car Game.

The Story Behind the ABC Car Game

My toddler, Boston, loves to organize his toys and is very particular about it. I guess he follows after me in that regard. Whenever long amounts of time lapse when he is quiet, I can usually find him lining up his cars, one by one, in rows on my bed or on the couch. If I ever try to move just one of his cars, even when he is not looking, he will notice the change and move the car back. Believe me, I have tried a few times. 😉

So taking in account his organization fetish, I lined up our ABC blocks in alphabetical order and asked him if he wanted to park his car in front of the letters. Of course he was delighted with the idea. I told him we would take turns parking a car in front of a letter that the other person chose. He said a letter and I parked a car in front of that letter then he parked in front of the letter that I said.

At first, he needed a lot of help, but slowly and surely he is recognizing what letters are which and having fun doing so!

Something that I thought was really cool, is after a few days of playing the game, he started to ask me what the letters were on each block or would tell me what they were while we set up the blocks. Now he tells me what each letter is while he pulls the blocks out of the toy bin in preparation to play. We are currently working on placing the ABC blocks in the correct spot in our alphabet lineup.

So this isn’t part of the “Common Core” standards but my logic behind this approach is memorizing and being able to put the letters in their proper order must do something for the brain, right? Maybe problem solving? Does anyone else “concur”?

Just to let you know how fun this game is, even Tennessee my little one year old likes playing along by parking his cars alongside ours. 🙂

To take the ABC Car Game up a notch, instead of choosing a letter, we are going to call out the sound of the letter and match our car up to that letter. We have yet to play the game this way, but will be trying it our next round.

Again I am really fond of this game, because to him it is a game. We might be playing with toys and I will ask “Do you want to play the ABC Car Game?” he says yes and then we learn our ABC’s. This is not a chore for either one of us, it is all part of playtime.

I love when learning is fun, don’t you?