My son LOVES cars. Well, to be more accurate, he’s obsessed with anything with wheels – cars, trucks, airplanes, trains, anything. If he is nearby, a toy vehicle is not far. One of his favorite activities is to sit in the driver’s seat of my car and pretend to drive.
Because of his passion, I have planned to someday to 3-part cards for the parts of a car. But I was waiting until he was able to read in order to benefit from the printed words on the cards.  Not long ago though, we were reading a book about a truck stuck in the mud up to its bumper. DJ pointed to the picture and said, “He’s stuck all the way up to that thing!”

Realization dawned. The one subject my son is most passionate about and he can’t name the individual parts. Yet he knows Europe, Africa, Rhombus, Cylinder. I knew I needed to correct this lapse. In Montessori, nomenclature like this is often taught with 3-part cards that isolate each aspect of an item in red. The child then matches the picture card and the word strip to the corresponding picture/word combo. Prepared cards can be purchased at a variety of locations.

I considered buying this set from Montessori Print shop but I decided against it because I didn’t want to pay for them (although they’re quite cheap), I wanted the text in cursive and this post on the Helpful Garden about having “parts of” cards in red really spoke to me. I am not trained so when a trained teacher takes the time to re-do all of her cards in red, I take it to heart.

So, I made my own cards! They’re probably not as high quality as a purchased set, but I think they look nice and an added bonus is that we actually have a Mustang so this car is very familiar to my son. There are 18 cards with the following nomenclature: car, hood, roof, windshield wipers, front fender, bumpers, fog lights, headlight, wheels, hubcaps, windows, rear panel, trunk, door, mirror, gas tank cap, indicator light, grill.

I used the picture to determine which words were plural or not since both fog lights are visible but only one headlight can be seen.  Also, I would have used the term “turn signal light” but I deferred to Montessori Print Shop which used “indicator light”.  I thought about having a separate card for “windshield,” but decided against it because it seemed strange to have a “windows” card that didn’t include the windshield.

I presented them today (just the picture cards, I left the word strips in the bag) and DJ had no trouble matching them. As he found a match, I named the part for him. Some he already knew and he named those. There are a lot of cards though and he didn’t finish so next time I think I’ll split them into two sets.

As a homeschooler, winging it without training and a small budget, I take advantage of a lot of free resources from other bloggers. So I’m sharing these cards for free download in both cursive and print. This is the first time I’ve done this so I hope these links work!

Parts of a Car (cursive)

Parts of a Car (print)

If you use them, I’d love to hear about it. Also, these downloads are for personal use only, not for sale and if used in a blog, please link back here.