Traffic Lights

This is a wonderfully easy and visually enticing messy play activity for babies, toddlers and children. It will keep your little ones entertained and learning. This activity teaches colour recognition as well as developing speech and language, their curiosity and encouraging them to explore.

Set Up

This was a really simple messy play activity to set up. I used red food colouring to dye some rice and dyed the caster sugar with green food colouring. I did this in the morning and left them both to sit on a radiator to dry. I used orange lentils for the amber light. I created a stencil by drawing around a plate, cutting it out and then pouring the messy play resource into the stencil before carefully lifting the stencil away. This isn’t necessary. I added the cars from our toy box to put the traffic lights into context, to encourage my 2 year old to experiment with making tracks in the different sensory resources and to listen for the different sounds he could create.

When my 2 year old boy came down from his nap he was immediately drawn to this activity. Partly because he loves anything transport related but also because the colours looked so enticing against the black of the tuff tray.

I then waited to see what he did. Read why I did this here.

My son took each car and drove them up and down the traffic lights, occasionally stopping to ask “what’s that noise?” While he played and explored we talked about the colours, the different textures and the marks or “tracks” that my son called them, that each car was making.

This visually enticing messy play activity was revisited on a number of occasions throughout the afternoon. As it was so easy to create and my son’s learning was so valuable it will be something we will repeat on a cold and wet afternoon.

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