Flannelboard: Five Cars So Squeaky Clean

I have a three week break between my last summer program and the next one in August, so I’m working ahead! Here’s a project I’ve had a lot of fun playing with.

Inspired by this post at Storytime in the Stacks, I’m planning to use this rhyme at an upcoming transportation storytime. Searching Canva for simple cartoon cars, I found an adorable series of art featuring animals driving cars. An idea was hatched.

Using simple shapes in the Canva app, I was able to alter the animals faces to give them all surprised looks to really emphasize a difference between the “clean” and “dirty” sides, and cover the cars and the animals with dirt splotches. Their faces crack me up!

Several of the cars in the series were red, so in order to have five different colors I worked some editing magic to put the mouse in a blue car instead of the original. And I wish the giraffe’s car was more green than teal, but that’s okay. The “clean” side had more of the original artwork, with the exception of the bear in the taxi, whose “surprised” face was the original, and I replaced the giraffe’s big eye with a small one for the clean side. Otherwise, I made eyes bigger and gave them open-mouthed expressions. I was liberal with the mud splotches, too!

Want to download your own copy? Find it here!

Notes on construction – I printed single-sided on cardstock and held the two sides up to the light to match up one car at a time (printing back-to-back will NOT line up the cars, sorry), then put a small piece of rolled tape between the two to keep them together while I cut around them. When each car was cut, I laminated and put a small adhesive velcro dot (or half a dot) on each side, hiding them on a white part.

Enjoy the rhyme!

Five Cars So Squeaky Clean
(tune of Five Green and Speckled Frogs)
Five cars so squeaky clean
Shiniest you’ve ever seen
Wanted to go out for a drive
BEEP, BEEP!
One drove into the mud
Spun out with a great big THUD!
Now there are four clean shiny cars

(count down)
last line:
…Now there are no clean shiny cars!
Source: Storytime in the Stacks