On a recent family road trip we were stuck in our car for many hours. Time seems to travel very slowly when you’re all cooped up. One way to pass the time more quickly is with a game (or two). I thought coming up with a game for a pre-schooler would be easy, but my little girl didn’t seem to like my ideas of counting red cars or the like. Instead, she decided to come up with a few on her own. I thought I’d share them with you in case your little one might also like them. We had four very cooperative adults and one 4-year-old playing, but the games can be adjusted for more or less car participants.
Spongebob fill-in-the-blank pants
Lilah happens to adore the character Spongebob so she had each of us say “Spongebob,” a word, then “pants”. For example: “Spongebob Fancy Pants” or “Spongebob Cow Pants” or “Spongebob supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Pants”. We had to do this in a specific order and then we would all laugh at whatever the person said whether it was funny or not. Then the next person would go. You could not repeat a word. We played this for over an hour. We constantly had to come up with something new and the time moved more quickly. When she tired of this we moved on to…
Handy Manny
This game was very similar, but you fill in the blank with a number or a letter. For example: “Handy Manny C” or “Handy Manny 1234.” Our numbers were getting out of hand. They turned into “Handy Manny 1 thousand 4 hundred 52 18 4 72 999.58885.123.123.222”. My dad started using fractions and my daughter’s numbers would take 5 minutes just to say. 🙂 For the slightly older kids, if they say a letter you could also have them say a word that starts or ends with it and/or use it in a sentence.
The last game we played was Diego. Are you sensing a trend here?
Diego’s musical instruments
For this game we had to say “Diego” and then say the name of a musical instrument. I don’t know about you, but this game could be very short unless all of you have an extensive list or musical instruments in your mind. This quickly turned into my mom telling my daughter a musical instrument and each of us saying it with our own spin. One person might pronounce it with a different em-PHA-sis on the SYLL-A-bles or someone else might say “drum” and then pretend they were drumming. You of course could do this with anything; colors, shapes, bugs, or animals.
The point is pick something your kids would like to say and get their brains engaged. It was also great fun for the adults because we all got to be “kids.”
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