Playing imaginatively with toy cars is an activity that so many children enjoy. Not only is great fun but Children can learn a whole host of skills from this activity. To further enhance this imaginative play activity, we love creating play roads for the children to push their toy cars along- especially when play roads can be so easy to create.

We’ve tried lots of different ways at constructing pretend roads on the floor for toy cars, from cardboard creations, to drawing chalk roads outside to using masking tape to create the layout (see how to make a masking tape airport here)

How to Make a Masking Tape Airport

However, we discovered this week a much simpler (and way more effective way) Nexus Road Tape. Simply, a huge roll of wide tape- that has a pretend road printed on it! So so clever and so easy to create brilliant road layouts for toy cars on your floor! It even has zebra crossings.

So once you’ve set up your pretend road, as well as being great fun.. what can children learn from it?

• Directions– Great Activity for introducing and reinforcing directions. Try asking your child to turn left at a junction, and help them to learn their lefts from their rights. It also enables children to practise planning out routes, thinking a few steps ahead at which way they will go.

• Road Safety– I wasn’t expecting to use this resource to teach road safety, but whilst playing- the children got out some toy people to cross the road and we realised it was a brilliant opportunity to discuss why they needed to look both ways, listen for cars etc before crossing.

• Turn taking & Sharing– For a lot of children taking turns and sharing can be challenging. As children can play pretend roads with other children, it creates an excellent time for children to practise these social skills. (If you haven’t read it already, here are our 6 tips for helping children take turns)