Keeping Kids Busy in the Car

Guest blogger Marelenise Roberts is an educator in Dallas, and the wife of one of our FedEx Office team members. She made some terrific car travel books this summer that we just had to share with our readers!

For this year’s family car trip, we upgraded from the traditional “I Spy” game.

This summer, our family drove from our home in North Texas to Disney World in Florida. It was almost a 20-hour drive with three kids in tow! Needless to say, I was worried about how we’d keep all three kids occupied in the car and avoid boredom. 

I captured their enthusiasm for the trip and for Disney by making them themed activity booklets for the car. I bought simple pocket folders with brads and filled them to the brim with all kinds of fun games. You could also have these coil-bound or secured like book. Then, I laminated the folders and decorated them with each child’s nickname. 

The folders had all kinds of goodies. Some were educational and grade-level appropriate, others were just for fun. I included U.S. maps for the kids to track our travel progress, coloring pages, a travel scavenger hunt with items like road signs, farm animals and kinds of vehicles, road trip bingo games, mazes, connect the dot pages, word searches and tic-tac-toe grids. And if that wasn’t enough, I added space to practice writing their letters and numbers, blank sheets for a travel journal (similar to the one blogger Kellie made for her niece here), photo pages and math practice worksheets for the older kids. They were jam-packed! The kids loved them and we loved the quiet time!

But the best part was how simple these were to make. I found a great resource, momsminivan.com, which was loaded with downloadable materials to help me put together these booklets. But you could also make up your own bingo games, tic-tac-toe grids and word searches to fill out a travel book. 

These books helped ensure that we didn’t hear “Are we there yet?” from the backseat before we even got out of the state of Texas! 

 

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