While travel-friendly tech & devices are great options too, we’ve put together some offline options to consider for your next car ride.
Hands On
Wikki Stix: These are a great road-friendly choice for keeping fun on (and in) hand! Another great choice where creativity is your only limit, assign challenges like making your favourite animal, or even helping to learn letter and number shapes by combining visual and physical/kinetic learning! Or ask for a number/colour combo I.e. Please pass me four green sticks.
Tip: Ziploc bags and lap desks (with storage) are also good to have on-hand so you’re not playing an endless game of pick up sticks every time you park!
Maze Balls: You’ll have a ball keeping your eye on the ball inside the ball! These range in ages and difficulties from Pre-K to 12+ (Keep in mind, I gave one of these to my father – a very handy guy, and even he takes a couple tries and still ‘drops the ball’ pretty often.) Hand/eye coordination and dexterity are definitely learned FAST in this game. Try it out and be a-mazed!
Make it competitive by having a time limit or seeing who can beat the Best Time Recorded in the car!
Plastic Lacing: Who remembers this stuff? It’s been around forever and with good reason! It’s colourful, durable, affordable and there are countless ways to keep busy and kill time by learning new patterns. In a long enough car ride, you could have made enough key chains, friendship bracelets, lanyards to stuff every stocking in the family or start your own campsite side business taking requests for colours! Patterns and tutorials are easily found for FREE online (especially on Youtube or Pinterest)
Minds On
20Q: Think of something…Anything… What is it? Chances are this handy little gadget will be able to guess whatever you’re thinking! From Spiderman to a doorknob, to a manatee to a piece of string. How does it do it? That’s the only question we CAN’T answer.
Take the whole family on this mysterious, mind-boggling quest of 20 questions. Any questions?
Mad Libs: This is an All-Ages time-honoured favourite, because YOU (the players) decide just how far you’re going to take it with your voracious vocab choices. This is also a great way to sneak in some English on-the-road-schooling to practice identifying and expanding knowledge of nouns and verbs!
Honourable Mentions
Rubiks Cubes, Remember the Lyrics! (Have someone ready with the tunes and a pause button!), The Alphabet Game (Make it harder with a theme like where you’re traveling (I.e. only things you would find on a campsite) or a just sea animals edition! Boredom – you’re busted!
So… are we there yet?