Making Travel with Children Fun- AND Educational!
“Yeah, right,” you say. Eight to ten hours in the cars with kiddos can sometimes seem like eighteen hours.
“How much loooon-ger??”
“Are we there yet??”
“I gotta pee!!!!”
If you’ve ever traveled with children, then odds are you’ve heard these questions and many more, at least twenty times during the trip.
While planning our vacation for fall break, I decided that there had to be a way to use that travel time constructively. I’m a planner, and I really hate to waste time, so it seemed to me that those hours of travel must be good for fitting in some fun and learning- without it seeming like fun and learning to my children.
A quick search on the internet, and I found it- the perfect idea…..and it included a binder/ notebook no less!! Anything that includes a new, fresh notebook full of paper and ideas pretty much seals the deal for me. Found on www.gluesticksblog.com, the Road Trip Binder was just what I needed.
The idea is to take a binder and fill it with different sections about your trip. She also includes several games you can print to put in the binder and play on the trip.
I started by making a cute cover for the front of the binder that had their picture on it. On the back, I printed off a section of the map of where we were going. We went to Charleston and it was incredible!
The first thing in the binder is a plastic pocket which holds pencils, crayons, stickers from the state we were going to visit, and small post it tabs for the games.
Next, I put several pieces of notebook paper with the date of each day we were to be there at the top. This was for them to journal about what we did each day.
After that were the games. These games were great fun, and the best part is you can use them time and again. They include the Alphabet Search, Slug Bug, I Spy With my Little Eye, and Street Sign Tic-Tac-Toe. You print the games off, put them in a put them in a page protector and use post it tabs to mark your places. When someone wins, you just pull off the tabs and start again!
The last page protector was empty and I labeled the top “Souvenirs”. They placed all their goodies in this during the trip. In the back pocket of the binder I chose a small book for each of them to have and read during the trip. I placed the binders in their seats in the car and surprised them with these the morning of the trip.
We had a ball with these binders! They loved them and we played the games over and over. The best part about these are that we can use them on the next trip by printing off new information about our next destination, and they also serve as a small scrapbook with the journaling and mementos picked up from the trips. Don’t get me wrong, we still heard, “are we there yet?” several times, but I believe they were fewer and far between!
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The last page protector was empty and I labeled the top “Souvenirs”. They placed all their goodies in this during the trip. Next, I printed off lots of information about Charleston; it’s history, facts, and culture. I slipped these in page protectors as well.
