Transportation Lesson Plan

This fun lesson will introduce students to different types of transportation and how they go. It makes a great first lesson for a transportation unit.

Materials

Book – Choo Choo Clickety-Clack! by Margaret Mayo

Chart paper and markers

White paper for each student

Crayons

Teach

Ask the students if they know what transportation is. Tell them that transportation is how people and things travel from one place to another. Give them a few examples, likes cars and trucks.

Procedure

Brainstorm a list of different kinds of transportation with the class.

Read the book Choo Choo Clickety-Clack! by Margaret Mayo to the students. Talk about all of the different types of transportation in the book, adding to your list as needed. You may need to tell them more about a few of the types that they may not be familiar with like cable cars and ferryboats.

On a large piece of chart paper make three columns labeled ground, air and water. Then with the class sort the kinds of transportation from the book and your list into the correct columns.

After you have finished sorting give each student a piece of paper to draw and color their favorite kind of transportation. If you want to make it a class book, have a prompt to at the bottom of the page – "I want to go on a ___________." Let the students fill in their answer and then draw the picture. Bind these together for a cute class book.

Assess

Since this is a introductory activity you can informally assess the students’ understanding of what transportation is through the class discussion and their pictures.

More Transportation Activites

Try these fun activities as part of your transportation unit.

• Sing songs about transportation. A few are "The Wheels on the Bus, " "Down by the Station" and "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." Add the verses "bump, bump, bump your boat" and "rock, rock, rock your boat" for a fun action song.

• Graph how students get to school in the mornings – walk, car, bike, bus. You can also make graphs for how many people have been on an airplane or boat or train. This could be one graph or you could make a yes/no graph for each one. "Have you ridden a train?" Graph yes or no.

• There are lots more sorting activities to go with this theme. Sort how many wheels, fast or slow, windows or no windows, etc.

• Make a transportation mobile. Give the students small pictures of different things that go to color and cut out. Then hang them from a hanger using yarn or string.

• Play Red Light, Green Light.

• Make traffic lights using a black rectangle and red, yellow and green circles to glue on for the lights.

• Read more books about transportation. Byron Barton and Donald Crews both have some great books for preschool about different kinds of transportation.

Try these lessons about transportation, too!