Road Signs

Materials

construction blocks
magazine picture of streets with signs and signals visible
toy cars and trucks
toy street signs

Standards

MA Standards:

Language/L.PK.MA.6: Use words and phrases acquired through conversations, listening to books read aloud, activities, and play.

Head Start Outcomes:

Logic and Reasoning/Symbolic Representation: Represents people, places, or things through drawings, movement, and three-dimensional objects.

PreK Learning Guidelines:

Mathematics/Shapes and Spatial Sense 10: Investigate and identify materials of various shapes, using appropriate language.

Road Signs

Skill Focus: Environmental Print, Hand-Eye Coordination, Imaginative Play, Vocabulary

Display the magazine pictures and ask children to talk about what they see in the pictures. Direct the discussion to include colors used in signs and signals.
Then tell children they will be building roads out of blocks and placing toy trucks and street signs along the roads.

Display toy street signs and encourage children to talk about the colors used in traffic signals and street signs.

For example, show a stop sign and ask, Where have you seen a sign like this? Do you know what it means?
Remind children that signs have words or symbols that communicate something to people.
You may need to explain that the colors on the signs are used to signal drivers.

Point out that signs have different shapes, symbols, words, and colors so drivers will know what each one means.

Have children place the signs and move toy vehicles along the roadways. Encourage them to think about what they think each sign means and why it is the color it is.

Adaptation: If you do not have access to toy street signs, you can easily create a street sign by cutting the appropriate shape and words out of colored construction paper, gluing the shape to a small wooden dowel, and pressing the dowel into modeling clay.