Comments on: Best Travel Games and Activities for Kids

By: Laura Cox

Laura Cox — Sun, 14 Jun 2020 01:50:51 +0000

Actually for road trips, one of THE best games (it takes HOURS because you never really find them all but can hunt the entire time as you pass cars, trucks, etc) is the license plate game. If you want to do it cheap, just write down the states of the license plates you see. You only write each state down once–the goal being to get all 50. You can also write down if you see unusual ones (Canadian plates, or DC plates). Everyone in the car can play–and you usually play as a team together, not individually. Kids start recognizing the way certain states plates look (there are variations, but usually only one or 2, most are standard for a particular state). Kids generally get excited as the list grows. Only rule really, your car has to be moving–so if you see one you’re really looking for in a rest area say….as long as you are coming or going it counts. There is a version (that we have since purchased) from Melissa and Doug that has every plate attached by little rubber bands that you can just flip it over. Game ends when the trip does. We usually do round trip, but you could restart on the ride home.

By: Katie - Wellness Mama

Katie - Wellness Mama — Thu, 02 Feb 2017 20:52:36 +0000

In reply to Jin. My personal favorite are these beef sticks.

By: Jin

Jin — Thu, 02 Feb 2017 20:42:17 +0000

Dear Wellnessmama/Katie,
I need your help.
I am planning to travel from US to my home country sometime in November this year so we can celebrate our daughter’s 1st christmas with family. My daughter will be ~1.5 yrs old when we travel. We have a loooong flight journey. ~16 hours at a stretch. I want to know what kind of food I can carry for my child so I dont have to rely on the plane food or whatever processed junk is avl at the airport.

By: Ana

Ana — Tue, 11 Oct 2016 13:55:26 +0000

This was really helpful because my whole family is going on an 18 hour trip from Texas to Illinois and we’re going to need this!

By: Katy

Katy — Sun, 19 Jun 2016 23:59:57 +0000

Any more suggestions for the 16month old age? We just took a trip, and all my toy/game ideas were a flop, primarily because they were too “old” for her.

By: Jeannie

Jeannie — Fri, 17 Jun 2016 22:53:49 +0000

We took a long road trip with my grands and daughter and son in law. Daughter Renee wrapped a variety of entertainment as gifts for showing good behavior (no whining, fighting, complaining) Some were needed items like socks, others were books, games, 1 video, They were great and loved unwrapping the ‘gifts’. They travel quite a bit and they eat their breakfast and lunch/ in the car and use their stop time to play games, go to an event, do a hike, or tour a museum getting the wiggles out, rather than to sit and eat.

By: Kate

Kate — Fri, 17 Jun 2016 03:01:09 +0000

I’ve been considering this for a while now. My husband and I are in the process of adopting two little girls from Uganda (ages 3 and 5). We will be going to pick them up in a few months. I have no idea their personalities, their desires, what they like… And they’ve never experienced American consumerism either (I’m kind of ok with that!). This post gave me ideas of what we can do on the 30+ hours of travel to get home. Any other suggestions, send em my way! Thanks!

By: JennBen

JennBen — Thu, 16 Jun 2016 18:55:23 +0000

My son is 3. We keep a shoebox size or largest Ziploc container with hot wheel sized cars for him to drive around the car or even on the map or Atlas pages. When we stop, the lid goes on to contain them and carry them to the hotel room or tent. We love the Melissa and Doug Water Wow for travel. We have taken color wonder markers with their special paper or regular coloring book and paper with color pencils or the Crayola twist crayons (we haven’t had any melt like regular crayons). We carry them in an old office clip board with a built in box under, so he just clips the paper on for a surface. The clip board also works well with the Melissa and Doug ‘craft’ notebooks. Looking forward to getting the tape book-we have done that kind of tape on just paper before at home and traveling.

By: Rainah

Rainah — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 01:55:32 +0000

When we had little ones in tow for a long trip, each day we had little activity bags for each child. Because they had something new each day, the days were not so monotonous. Each bag had activity ideas of things in it, not just new toys/coloring-books/etc. The children liked almost everything in each bag, but, perhaps more to the point, they enjoyed being able to call an idea here or there a silly idea. Looking back, I wish I’d included some really goofy ideas just to give them more memories of running into bad ideas, declaring them so, and knowing how right they were….. — I particularly thrilled whenever my husband was willing to stop every so often to let the children run and goof off at the rest stops. For any trip that needed such stops, we packed balls and collapsible frisbees, etc. — But I think a friend of mine did even better: Her large family of various aged children would change up what they were doing every fifteen minutes…. which might be overkill for a super long trip, but for portions of the long days on the road, I wish we had done this (the older children and the younger children learned to play together under her close, but playful guidance). e.g. – exercise for 15 minutes…. like, 20 repetitions of a finger exercise, 20 reps of a toe exercise, etc. – w/each little child making up an exercise for everyone else to do; sing songs for 15 minutes (mom can sing a favorite song or spiritual or whatever at the end, and dad too if he likes to sing); listen to a book for 15 minutes (taking turns who reads and what age level the book is targeting), etc. — I’d still want ‘quiet hour’ at some point.

By: mary

mary — Tue, 14 Jun 2016 19:36:32 +0000

Very timely as we are taking a road trip from TX to Ohio with my 2 year old! I haven’t tried these yet–but I have heard good things about the no-mess crayola markers and special paper!