Building a wind car is a fun activity for kids of all ages to learn about the science of wind and work on fine motor skills at the same time!
DIY Wind Car
When I was planning this months wind and weather theme I came across a cool wind car kit from Kiwi Crate. But when I went to purchase it for this month, the kit had been discontinued. 🙁 I still really wanted to make one with Caden so I looked at the review on Pioneer Woman and figured out what supplies I needed and how to make our own! This DIY Wind Car is a really easy science lesson and fine motor fun all in one!
Supplies:
- One 8×5″ foam board with slit cut into center
- Two 5″ long milkshake straws
- Two 8′ long cake pop sticks
- One 5×5″ cardstock square
- One large craft stick
- Four wooden wheels
- Stickers
- Tape
-
Play Dough
How to make your own wind car in 6 easy steps!
Step one, decorate your foam board with stickers or however you wish. Caden enjoyed applying sparkly bug stickers to his wind car. Crafting with stickers is easy, and a great way to work on fine motor skills!
Step two, using tape attach the straws to both ends of the foam board. I don’t have a picture of this because it was too difficult for Caden to do on his own and I had to help him.
Step three, slide the cake pop sticks through the straws. Cake pop sticks come in a variety of sizes, so I bought the longest ones I could find and cut them down to the size I needed. Caden was able to slide the sticks through the straws on his own as long as I held the foam board steady.
Step four, slide the wooden wheels on to the cake pop sticks and cap it with the play dough to keep the wheels from falling off. Caden did this on his own too! Just needed a little help to prevent the cake pop sticks from sliding all the way through the straws!
Step five, decorate the paper sail with stickers or however you want! Caden was so over decorating by this time and was ready to see the wind car in action!
Step six, attach the sail to a craft stick with tape and insert the craft stick into the slit in the foam board. Now the wind car is ready to race!
Let’s Race!
After our wind cars were all built and ready to go, we raced them down the speedway! It would have been a lot of fun to go outside and test the wind’s power, but it was way too cold out to do that! So we lined up our wind cars inside and Caden tried to be the wind and blow them with his breath! This did not work so well!
So we brought out a big fan and had so much fun racing our wind cars! We lined up our cars again and turned the fan on high! They wind cars raced down the hall!
Happy Fine Motor Friday!
Be sure to check out these great fine motor ideas from my co-hosts!
Cupcake Liner Flower Craft: Fine Motor Art for Kids from Still Playing School
Easter Fine Motor Activities from Little Bins for Little Hands
12 Fine Motor Activities from School Time Snippets
10 Velcro Fine Motor Activities from Lalymom
Spring Butterfly Art and Garden Play from Powerful Mothering
Our NEW 99 Fine Motor Ideas for Ages 1 to 5 is full of all types of enriching fine motor activities that your kids will love! And you will love them too because they are simple to set up and use everyday items you probably have around the house! Each activity includes full color photos, a materials list and step-by-step instructions. It’s a fantastic resource for parents, educators, and caretakers!
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We’ve had so much wind where we live that I think we could race these on our driveway. My kiddos will be thrilled!
We have a lot of wind today too! I think we shall have to take out our wind cars!
Love love love these!
This looks very fun. I like that it is made with foam board – light so it can be wind powered. Fun science project for little ones!
Very cool science and fine motor activity! I think my 6 year old would love this!
Awesome! Thanks for giving the step-by-step instructions, Samantha!
You are so creative! I need to work on implenting more science, thanks!
Thanks! Science is so fun & easy to do! I need to work on other academics. 🙂
Oh my so fun!! I love the idea of the fan, I think both my kids would laugh a lot with this one!
Oh I love this activity! My son would really enjoy this and it looks like you guys had lots of fun too!
Thanks for sharing 🙂
x
I love how you turned a product for purchase into a DIY project. These wind cars look adorable. Thanks for sharing in STEM Tuesday!
Oh my gosh this is SUCH a fun idea!! My little guy would LOVE it so it’s on our to do list 🙂 Thanks so much for sharing at the Playful Learning Linky!
This is a neat idea!
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How fun! My son would love doing something like this 🙂
Looks like a lot of fun, and way to use the fan!
Fun!! My girls would love creating their own!!
I know 2 kids that would have a lot of fun making this car! This is a great idea for science and fine motor fun!
Thank you for stopping by the Thoughtful Spot Weekly Blog Hop this week. We hope to see you drop by our neck of the woods next week!
Thanks for the great idea and description! I especially like the fan. I’m going to be using this with a 15-kid pre-k, so I adapted your instructions to use materials I already had or that I could buy cheaply. I scaled the car body down to 4×5″ of foam board, so I needed only one poster sheet of that, and one regular straw and wooden skewer (no cake pop sticks) per car. A popsicle stick and jumbo index card are my sail. The biggest savings were in using mini styrofoam balls for the wheels. I wish they were cylinders instead of spheres, but they work well, and they were easy to poke onto the skewers.