LEGO Car Ramp Painting

We've been celebrating LEGO WEEK all week long and I've been so exited to see all of the awesome ideas my blogging friends have shared along with me this week. I've been pinning them all over on my LEGO and Learning Pinterest board if you've missed any of them.

As we wrap up LEGO WEEK, I wanted to share this super simple painting activity we tried this last week using our LEGO bricks. This activity was definitely messy, but totally fun.

At my son's LEGO themed birthday party a year or two ago we had car building competitions using LEGO bricks. This week we decided to have a little competition and create some LEGO cars and then race them down ramps covered in paint.

This was fun and messy and also allowed us to have a little science lesson about gravity and forces and weights. 

Materials Needed: 

LEGO or LEGO DUPLO bricks, LEGO wheels that fit your bricks, large piece of cardboard (or a pad of paper with a cardboard back), large easel paper (several sheets) or a large roll of paper, washable paint (we used red, blue, green, and yellow), paper plates (or something for the paint to go on), painter's tape  

SET UP:

For this part we kept it simple. My set up was not the prettiest, but it was quick... and when you have a toddler trying to destroy everything you set up... that is important. All we did was use painter's tape to attach our cardboard and paper to a chair.

The cardboard kind of dipped part way down, so we stuck some blocks underneath to help push it out a bit.

Next I just taped easel paper on the floor where we were going to drive the cars. If you have a long wide roll of paper, that is easier, but we didn't and this set up worked fine too.

While I got the paint out and ready on paper plates... the kids built their LEGO vehicles.

My daughter chose to use LEGO DUPLO while my son used regular little LEGO bricks.

TO CREATE:

In order to create all we needed to do was dip our wheels in the paint and then launch our vehicles off the ramp!

The kids loved exploring colors and making rainbow designs on the paper with the wheels.

As we explored the paint and how the wheels operated, we tweaked things like how the blocks were positioned on the wheels, how heavy the vehicles were, and what items were sitting on the vehicles.

We learned that the simplest car ended up going fastest.

I measure success of an activity based on how long my kids want to stay and play... and this was one where I finally had to tell them we needed to clean it up. They had so much fun and loved moving the cars around to see the different places they would go and the sort of marks they would leave,

After we created for awhile, we set up a simple "car wash" station to let the kids clean the paint off their cars.

We will definitely be doing LEGO car ramp painting again! 

Note: This is an activity that you can do with kids ages 18 months/2 years on up but how much you love it depends on you. It will be a messy activity, so be prepared for that. If your child likes to eat paint, you might want to skip this activity until he is a bit older.

Have you ever painted with cars or done ramp painting before? Any other variations you can share with me?

If you are just joining in, here are our other LEGO posts from LEGO Week:

• Lego Build and Knock Down
• Pretend Play Toy Store with LEGO bricks
• Sensory Play with LEGO bricks
• Feed the LEGO Monsters: a Sorting and Building Game

Don't forget to head over to our LEGO Week series page to check out all of the other great LEGO posts we'll be sharing from our blogging friends this week. Our favorite was the Sensory Play with LEGO bricks we shared on Wednesday.