How To Make Your Family Road Trips Fun and Educational

It’s the summer season again. Everyone is excited for road trips – except Mom. Here are a few tips on how you can make the trip free from kiddies’ brawls and whines:

1. Play the time away. Get your kids playing to keep busy. Keep string or yarn handy for doing cat’s cradle. If you and your kids are not yet familiar with how the game works, here’s how to play.
   
2. Prepare a craft box for the kids beforehand. This will fill your trip with some fun activities to while away the time until you get to your destination. Put in a blank journal for your kids to record a travel itinerary throughout your trip. Include road maps, washable markers, crayons, scrap papers, construction paper, felt, stickers, stencils, hole puncher, craft scissors, popsicle sticks, colored pipe cleaners, tapes, ribbons and yarns. If your kids are the crafty kind, they’ll know what to do with these. By the way, don’t forget to bring a small trash bin. Creativity could get messy.
3. Activity sheets. Another preparation you can do to make your family trip fun and educational is to download or make your own printable activity sheets – tic-tac-toe sheets, connect the dots, word search, puzzle games and the like.
4. Ye olde coloring book. If you feel the kids would still be restless during the trip even with the suggestions above, go ahead and bring out some interesting coloring books to keep your kids busy. Remember that boredom fades as creativity flourishes. Check out FreeKidsColoring.com for ready-to-print coloring sheets.
5. Be a game director. Lastly, be a game director. Instruct you kids on how to play an interesting, fun and educational game. Check out these web pages for tons of suggested road trip activities: Trip Games Make Travel Easier for Kids and Classic Road Trip Games. Unfortunately, most parents only see these classic road trip games as fun when in truth, kids could learn from these activities as well. My personal favorites involve the spotting of car license plates. One game is to spot car license plates coming from different states and having the kids color the states in a blank United States map. The second game with car plates is to make up phrases using the three letters of the car plates as acronyms. One last game is to add the three numbers of the car plates. For instance, if the car plate in front of you is ILY 317, the phrase could be ‘I Love You’ and the sum = 11. The most quick and witty wins in these games!

The above-mentioned are the kind of activities that are not only fun for the family but also get your kids learning even when it’s vacation time. Now join in the kids’ fun. You’ll never get bored yourself!