Traveling with Kids

Are we there yet? Post your stories about travel with kids (strategies for successful travel also appreciated).

3 Comments

My biggest problem with my children is the boredom the have when traveling. So we started a few things. When they were little I would take cookie sheets and they would use these as trays. They worked great because they were magnetic so the could play with their magnetic books and they held crayons in place so they were not sliding all over. The kids could color and draw with out losing their crayons.

We never had a car DVD player so we had to come up with some fun games. We play the alphabet game, the license plate game, and the word game.

Alphabet Game:

You start with the letter A and you have to find all the letters in the alphabet, The only rules are you can not use something in the car, you have to see it and someone else has to see it, and you can not use the same word and the same sign twice. For example: if you need the letter "D" amd you see the word Hampden, then you need to find another word for the letter "E"

License Plate Game:

In this game we see who can find the license plate that is farthest from the state we live in.

The Word Game:

I map out our trip before we leave. Then I give each child a list of words that they need to find a long the way. This is great fun and it gets them reading.

Good Luck and have a great Holiday season.

Mon, 2008-11-24 13:17

ilanabit

We struggled with putting a DVD player in our car too because we didn't want the kids zoning out all the time in front of some toon... especially just driving to basketball practice or band rehearsal. Afterall, that's the best time to talk to the kids.

So we made a rule that the DVD player didn't come on unless the trip was more than an hour. Then, as media producers, we decided to create a DVD that allowed kids to create their own custom "road trip". That DVD, TripFLIX takes kids to 25 locations across the country, from Sea World to The Grand Canyon Railroad to Lonesome Spur Ranch to Space Camp. Our hosts, Alex and Emily, experience all the adventure of each location and impart a little wisdom as lear to ride horse, train dolphins, and fly the Space Shuttle.

www.tripflix.com

Sun, 2008-12-14 12:32

Asianmommy

On our trips, we make sure the kids have lots of snacks, books, music, crayons, stickers, coloring pages, construction paper, dot-to-dot pages, mazes, aquadoodle, magnadoodle, leapster, or gameboy. If we're traveling out-of-state, we'll let them watch DVDs. They also like to sing, make up stories, or play I Spy. I haven't tried this, but I read somewhere that you should wrap up a bunch of little toys (old or new) in wrapping paper or tissue paper and give them one to unwrap every 30 minutes or so. Sounds fun!

Tue, 2009-01-13 19:12