Car Show - and lesson.

Car plus math equals fun! 🚗➕🧮

First we talk about visitng a car show. Then we share our lesson. Scroll down if you just want the lessons and art activities.

CAR SHOW: a fun experience!

We visited a car show in Cocoa Beach, Florida.

Here are some photos! Can you guess which cars were their favorites? 

Wish I had taken more photos.

Our girl even got to hand out awards!

Shaved ice and popcorn made it extra fun! The DJ sounded just like Mater from Cars, and his music was all fun beached themed oldies so we couldn't resist dancing.  

Our youngest would have stayed forever if we let her, she threw a fit when it was time to go back home.

Then we went back home to watch the movie Cars and play.

LESSON

Do you like to race your cars?

We do!

Here's a link to a silly little lesson we made where we learned about velocity. We raced our toy Shuttle and a Tesla Model S car. We set up a ruler going North/South, lined up at the starting point and vroom! Guess who had the highest velocity? 

https://youtu.be/Zz9jktqMU6s

We repeated this with an assortment of vehicles. So fun!

I made up some cards to help us talk about a simple equation for velocity. We talk about distance and time. We abbreviate these words with letters.  There's the equation v= d/t and we layed our words out under the equation so they read velocity = distance / time. We then solve some word problems for velocity. The one pictured reads "she raced a car 15 cm. She went North. She went North for 30 seconds. What was her velocity?"

These exercises allow children to become comfortable looking at an equation and applying it in a tangible way. You may notice that I color code my words so they are blue for consonants and red for vowels.

NASA lesson

For older kids, here's a NASA lesson with designing cars, racing them, and learning how to calculate mean, median, and mode:

https://www.nasa.gov/stem-ed-resources/team-extreme-stats-success-guide.html

Art + Cars

Are you trying to think of a cool activity to do with cars and art? Tempera paint washes off our cars easily. Put down a big piece of paper covering your workspace. Pour some tempera paints on your space. Drive your cars through it and around on your paper! This sensory rich experience allows them to explore with paint while playing with their cars. 

To make this activity more enriching, you can talk about driving North, South, East, and West with your cars. After the paint dries you can label the paths your cars traveled. You can talk about the names of colors or label them as streets to an imaginary village.

Neighborhood in Chalk

To spend more time talking about your neighborhood and the cars that drive through it, break out the sidewalk chalk. Ask them questions as you draw a neighborhood for their outdoor cars/trucks. Let him drive them all around you as you have fun drawing, leave the chalk out for them to use, too - an invitation to create. Sometimes, depending on the car and brand of chalk, you can fit the chalk between the wheels of the car so as they push a car around it draws with the chalk.

What kind of math, art, geography, or other learning do you do with your cars? Share! Let's have some fun.