Road Warriors

As my kids continue down the path of wanting to be spies, a couple of awesome things have happened. One, the toys are much cooler. I’ll take night vision goggles and walkie talkies over talking Fantastic Gymnastics Dora any day (sorry Dora!). Two, the books are more exciting. Nancy Clancy beats Fancy Nancy any day, I kind of like Young Cam Jansen, and the non-fiction stuff the kids are bringing home is teaching me along with the kids. Not to mention that the kids have their noses in books more and more, which is generally a good thing. But the third great outcome of the recent spy obsession is that the kids are much more observant lately (blame the binoculars). All kinds of little every day things require additional exploration.

One of the biggest things that the kids are all about understanding is how the roads work. You see, as spies they might be tapped at any moment, given keys to a fancy car, and sent on a secret mission. As such, they need to really understand how to drive. Our every car ride last week was filled with, “why are there two double lines on that side of the road?” or “what does a yellow diamond sign with two connected black lines mean?”

So this weekend we designed our own city to explore why all of those signs and lines are there. This is easy and mostly mess-free. All you need is construction paper, chalk, scissors, and tape.

First we need places to go. I ask the kids what the most important places to have in a city are. They say: a home, friends’ homes, school, doctor’s office, a water park, a “regular” park, a gym (meaning for gymnastics and cheer practices), a supermarket, work, and New York City (which they’ve never been to) and Florida for vacations. So we make those.

Then we spend some time thinking about where everything should be.  The kids think that the doctor and the friends should be close to our house. It's fun watching them reason out how far away school and work should be. We separate the places around the playroom mat (so chalk doesn’t get all over the floor).

I then tell them the basics of creating a road.

-The lines: Yellow lines mean don’t cross them. Double yellow lines mean traffic is going in the opposite direction on the other side of it. White dashed lines are lane markings. The kids want turn lanes too, so I tell them that they would have a white arrow. No, the kids want the turn lanes you can stop in the middle of the street on that are double yellow lines with lots of yellow diagonal lines inside. Okay. We add those to our little key too.

-The size: Big streets don’t usually go through smaller areas. You need more lanes if you think there will be lots of traffic.

-The signs: If two roads meet you’ll need stop signs or yield signs so everyone doesn’t crash. Stop signs usually happen on smaller roads. On big roads or highways, people are going fast so you might want to have the smaller merging road yield to the fast road.

Then I let them create roads through their city.

 Briana insists that there are walls between the double yellow lines on interstate highways, so she adds orange lines in the middle of her road to NY to signify the walls.

While the kids are hard at work, I listen to them debating the best way to get places. They talk about how to get home from school it’s a short ride on a highway and then a longer ride on smaller roads. 

They ask me, “do you think it takes this long to make a real road?” Since it took only about thirty minutes to make our whole city, I tell them, “no, it takes much longer. Weeks even.” We stop to talk about construction and the steps to planning, ordering supplies, getting a crew, pouring, smoothing, and setting a road. Then they are back with new plans for their roads.

Usually we are doing more mom-involved science experiments and the like, so I appreciate that they can do this one all on their own. I make lunch while they scream, “don’t look yet!” periodically, and do their own troubleshooting.

 Adding some stop signs with red chalk.

 Ta da! Their city.

Then they want to make two ways to get to every place in their city so the occupants would have some variety. Unfortunately, we have to go get dressed and get on the road ourselves. We can always build more another day. The road is calling...

<3 Pedigreed Housewife