Kids car activities

[k23m]

I'm taking my girls (age 5 and 2) to a wedding next weekend and the trip will be about 6 hours each way. We arent going to be rushed so we can make a couple stops at playgrounds if the weather is nice. We have a DVD player but the kids cant quite operate it themselves and I wont be able to do it when I am driving alone, so I am not going to bring it. I do have a ipod touch that my 5 yr old plays games on and I might throw a couple cartoons on it.
I've also got some of those color wonder coloring books (the kind where the markers only work on this special paper).
What else can I bring to keep my kids busy/happy? I'm thinking a trip to the $ store is in order...

 

[MamaBee]

*cough* this is a fabulous product... Kept my kiddo (age 5) fully entertained on a 4 hour plane ride...



Another thing that keeps my kiddo so busy when he was in the 2-5 range were electronic learning toys - like Leap Frog or vtech. He would spend hours pressing buttons, especially the vtech vreader and innotab... in fact the other day we had a funeral and for the 3 hours of visitation, he was content with his vreader in the family room.

 

[Trista]

That lil project from Rebecca is priceless. I so wish I had it for when we traveled in the car often.

Frequent stops are a great option. Especially if you can stop at a park or some place fun.

If you have time to visit the dollar store to get some little toys that will do the trick. What I do is buy the little dollar brag book albums or the $1 note pads and lots of stickers. My kids love to stick stickers and it keeps them busy for a bit.

Another thing that I do is pack little mystery baggies in advance. For example... we would travel 5 hours from our house to visit family and during times when they started getting restless I would pass out a bag. The bag - a lunch sack - would have usually a snack (pretzels, goldfish, m&m's) and a toy or game. The sacks were sealed so the kids had to open them and it was like opening a gift. This would keep them entertained for a while and they would eagerly await the next mystery bag. There was one time that I didn't have a chance to go pick up some cheap toys before the trip, so I bagged up some of my kids older toys - and it was still exciting to have a gift to open.

Hope you have fabulous trip!

 

[k23m]

*cough* this is a fabulous product... Kept my kiddo (age 5) fully entertained on a 4 hour plane ride...

I like this...other than all the American stuff in it (no offence), so a chunk of it is not appropriate for us up here. I DO like the idea of laminated pritables....I'm just trying to figure out if I have time to make some!

Anyone know how long it takes for Staples to do laminating, and how much it costs?

 

[scrap2day]

Another thing that I do is pack little mystery baggies in advance. For example... we would travel 5 hours from our house to visit family and during times when they started getting restless I would pass out a bag. The bag - a lunch sack - would have usually a snack (pretzels, goldfish, m&m's) and a toy or game. The sacks were sealed so the kids had to open them and it was like opening a gift. This would keep them entertained for a while and they would eagerly await the next mystery bag. There was one time that I didn't have a chance to go pick up some cheap toys before the trip, so I bagged up some of my kids older toys - and it was still exciting to have a gift to open.

I was going to say something like this. For me I would tell the kids ahead of time that there are surprise bags coming during the trip if they are not disruptive during the drive. I might even show them the sealed bags ahead of time so they are sort of excited to behave.

For kids that age I would probably plan to hand out a bag every 45 minutes because it all feels so long to them. I also would not fill the bags too full with stuff. Just enough to keep them busy for about 30 minutes. I would also split up snacks into smaller snacks so each bag has a treat but not too much for them to eat at a time.

Ok. This thread has me thinking. Maybe I should go back to something like this for our road trips with a pre-teen and teen. Hmmm.