Traveling With Children
A few days ago our 19 year old came home from work shaking her head. She'd been listening to the radio, a Christian station, and there was a program on where the radio commentators were asking people to share their tips for enjoying their children while traveling. One lady called in and said that the best thing her family ever did for a family car trip was buy each child individual handheld computer games and head phones. "WE didn't hear a peep out of them for 12 hours," she said.
Pip, our 19 year old, was flabbergasted. The radio hosts were a bit surprised as well. One of them said, "Well, we do have those and my kids play with them some. But we have found that we get some really good family time in on family vacations if we don't allow those in the car." The lady was oblivious, however, and explained how when she was young, her parents had bought individual walk-mans for every child and they said it was the best thing they had ever done.
That reminded me of an article my mother read in some family magazine extolling the delights, nay, the necessity, of having an in car DVD player for long car trips. She was so indignant (in a grandmotherly fashion) that she wrote the magazine to tell them that her daughter and son-in-law traveled with seven children all the time and they did not use electronic devices.
It's nice that Mom is proud of me, but that wasn't strictly true. There are the cattle prods.......
I kid, I kid!! We do listen to CDs (and now an iPod plugged into the radio so we can all hear it), but we do more visiting and playing games- FREE games.
One silly but oddly compelling game Pip told us about from that radio program is called 'Banana.' You simply watch for yellow vehicles and try to be the first to see it and say, "Banana!" Keep track of how many you see first and the one with the most points at the end of the designated time wins. She, our 14 y.o. and 6 y.o. Blynken have been playing it every Sunday on the way to and from church. Several times somebody has suggested a different color and fruit to match, but as Pip says, bananas is just funnier, and for some reason it really needs to be a three syllable word. Kumquat ought to be funny, but it just isn't in this game, and tangerine or persimmon both have the requisite three syllables, but they aren't as funny as banana. We don't know why, it just is, so we accept it in a totally zen sort of way. Or as zen as you can be while shouting, "BANANA!"
You can also, should you just have one or two small children, have one of them clap everytime he sees a red car, and the other clap when he sees a white car.
Here are a couple other free car games:
Buzz: Count off, in order, and keep counting (driver says one, passenger says two, backseat dweller says three, etc). Only every time somebody gets to the number seven, a number with seven in it, or a multiple of seven, instead of saying the number, that person claps and says 'buzz.' 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, buzz, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, buzz, 15, 16, buzz, 18, 19, 20, buzz....
You can change the 'buzz' words as needed for your children- do multiples of five, ten, or don't do multiples at all, or use whatever number they are trying to memorize.
Categories: I name a category (later the children get to choose) and ask each child to name an item in that category- I might say flowers, and then they all have to tell me the name of a flower, or I might choose bugs and they have name different bugs. With older children we go around the car and name them in alphabetical order, trying to get through the alphabet. You can adapt this for a wide age range by allowing the smaller children to skip the alphabetical sequence.
Who Am I?- Choose Bible characters, nursery rhymes, characters from books you read or even, gulp, television shows and movies. You can give three to five clues, as easy or difficult as your audience can handle, and they guess who you are. Example: "I'm a woman in the Old Testament. I was a queen. I wore make-up. I encouraged my husband to take what wasn't his. Who am I?" (Jezebel)
You can also play this like 20 questions. YOu skip the 'animal, vegetable, or mineral' question, of course, and just say, "Okay, I'm ready. Who Am I?" Then they ask questions to help them guess. We usually allow two questions for this one- good or bad? Married or single? Old or New Testament? Male or Female? Human or Animal?
What about you? What are some of the ways your family whiles away the time while traveling- or sitting in a waiting room?
For other ideas, see this post and this one on my family's regular blog
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17 Responses to “Traveling With Children”
April 30th, 2010 at 6:15 am
We play “Hey, cow!”. It only works when driving through rural areas. Each person or team gets a side of the car and when you see cows you roll down the window and scream “HEY! COW!” as loud as you can. The number of cows that turn to look at you are the number of points you get.
It also works with horses but is not quite as funny.
April 30th, 2010 at 8:13 am
We played the alphabet game. One person would start with A and have to either name a word or item they see that starts with A and so on.
Another is keeping track of lisence plates (states) and see how many we can find.
Another, it does include a purchse, however you could make it yourself- car bingo. Put animals, cars, trucks, silos, etc and try to get bingo.
Oh I could probably think of more… my family always played games in the car.
April 30th, 2010 at 8:20 am
We play this: When you are stopped at a red light, say of all the words you can think of that start with the letter “A”. At the second light, it is all “B” words, and so on. Now that the kids are older, we changed the rules to use only 3 syllable or longer words.
April 30th, 2010 at 8:41 am
When we did road trips with children we played games with license plates. We made a sentence with the letters and numbers on the plate of ‘green car’ or a VW…
We told stories too. Dad would start the story, in a while Mom (me) would pick up the story, then we would ask the oldest child “what happened next” in the story…and then the baby (we only had 2 sons) would finish the story.
The kids never seemed to get tired of me reading to them from a chapter book.
April 30th, 2010 at 10:07 am
I usually knock out a book or two. This is what I have always done traveling, and my mother used to drive me nuts, because she’d stop me all the time to say “look at that!” and it was just some more trees. The places we travel to have a similar wildlife/greenery to our home, so I get pretty bored looking out the window. For years she would tell me “I just don’t know how you can read a book when all this pretty scenery is going by”, but it all looks the same! In a flash of irony, she reads in the car now too.
April 30th, 2010 at 10:09 am
My brother and I were fond of “The Minister’s Cat,” an alphabet game. One would start, “The minister’s cat . . . is an ANGRY cat.” The other would reply, “The minister’s cat . . . is a BEAUTIFUL cat.” And so on through the alphabet.
We’d sneak peeks at the dictionary before a long trip storing up adjectives starting with X, Q, and Z.
April 30th, 2010 at 10:40 am
We like to mix up who sits where on long trips. It always amazes me that it seems to make such a big difference. I mean, they see whoever the new person is that they’re sitting by all the time at home, but in the car, it makes a big impact. All of ours are in carseats or boosters, so we move the boosters and leave the carseats installed.
We also distribute any new toys and trinkets slowly throughout the journey. On our last trip, I passed out something new each time we crossed a state line. Sometimes it was something small, like a juice box and some raisins. For states we would be in for many hours, it was something more significant. I found little Lego kits meant to be put in Easter baskets shortly before we left, and they were really popular for my older ones. We don’t celebrate Easter with baskets, but I’m not above shopping on that aisle for the cute toys (especially after Easter is over and everything is on sale!).
I also stock up on placemats with a US map on them in the $1 section at Target when they have them there. I map out our trip with wet erase markers (dry erase markers would rub off too easily) and have the kids follow along as we go through other states or change directions. They end up making up little quizzes and asking each other things like, “Which state is west of Texas? What’s the capital of Montana?”
I pack things to encourage running around at rest stops. Sometimes it’s something we already have at home, like an inflatable ball. On our last trip, I bought $1 guns with foam-disk bullets for each of the kids old enough to walk. They were cheaply made and won’t survive until our next trip, but I got our money’s worth. Sometimes just saying, “Get out and run,” isn’t enough.
April 30th, 2010 at 11:23 am
We always use to play the alphabet game where you tried to find all the letters of the alphabet from A to Z and we would do it backwards from Z to A. We would also play color games where some one would chose a color and we would have to find 10 items of that color in the surrounding traffic or signs. Twenty questions was also really popular. When they were very little I would bring two of their small toys and turning slightly from the front seat I would do a puppet show for them and then give them their toys. They would continue the puppet show together, sometimes for the rest of the trip.
April 30th, 2010 at 4:57 pm
only had one child, but…as a newborn he traveled from mississippi to washington d.c. in my lap on a king size pillow. at 6mos. he traveled in a car seat and had a traveling babysitter we hired to entertain and change diapers etc…when it came to weaning from the bottle all it took was a road trip and one six pack of ready to use bottles from the drugstore..when the last bottle was gone he was weaned…as he grew we played many roadtrip games like the liscense plate game etc…that were not only entertaining but taught skills in reading, writing, arithmetic etc… kids today are just like kids yesterday…nothing to do? where there is a shoebox and imagination there will be something for them.
April 30th, 2010 at 7:44 pm
Something else we did was use a metal sheet cake pan to hold on their lap. This holds game pieces, colors, etc. on their lap. It is also a magnet holder..These slide under the front seat too when not in use.
April 30th, 2010 at 10:47 pm
We played the categories game, or read. Or colored. My parents usually stuck a small tv between the front seats and would sometimes put on a video, but not for an entire long drive (we did several long road trips when I was a kid). After a certain point we did have walkmans or cd players or game boys, but none of us listened to them all the time- mostly if we were driving through the night and it was too dark to read.
April 30th, 2010 at 11:00 pm
We listened to Stories of Great Christians from Moody, Focus on the Family Radio Theatre, Jonathan Park (Vision Form). Drawing with magnadoodles or Etch Sketches, playing Rush Hour (Timberdoodle). Some family members prefer crocheting or drawing. Read MANY books!
May 1st, 2010 at 8:53 am
We spend 3 days each way traveling to visit family at least once a year. We take drawing materials, books, crochet projects(my 8 year learned this year in the car). We have other smallish toys that must fit into one plastic bin with a lid, snacks and drinks, and our two small dogs.
We do have a DVD player my mom bought us a few years ago, but I only allow 3 movie’s a day, the choices include Vegetales, and Leapfrog learning DVD’s, as well as some holiday and Disney flicks, we talk about the movies as well.
Not the most frugal, but I do limit the use of the DVD player to the long trips.
May 1st, 2010 at 4:31 pm
These are great ideas- some of these are games our family loves, too (The Minister’s Cat! We’ve never met anybody else who played!), and Hey, Cow sounds hilarious.
Amy, we’ve also packed jump ropes and sidewalk chalk to play jump rump and hopscotch at rest stops, and we’ve held races during our rest stops. Several other good (and new to us) games here- thanks!!
May 3rd, 2010 at 12:24 pm
When I was growing up, we would try to count how many American flags there were from the start to finish of the trip.
May 4th, 2010 at 9:22 am
Yes, they are fun games. When we traveled when I was a child (with two sisters and a brother), we used to play categories too. Also, traveling across the country one summer we tried to see who could spot license plates from the most states. Another fun way to pass the time was to look at houses along the way and assign them to one of our siblings–There’s Teddy’s house.
May 5th, 2010 at 7:17 pm
We have driven from Los Angeles to Boston and back, and done a western states loop. Both trips lasted 5 weeks, and we pulled a travel trailer. We play almost of the games already mentioned, but we also like to listen to audio books. We listened to Island of the Blue Dolphins crossing the southwest, and Huck Finn crossing the Mississippi River. We listened to Where the Red Fern Grows crossing the Ozark Plateau, and numerous other classics.
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