Best Travel and On-the-Go Car Games for Kids

“Mom. Are we there yet?”   Summer traveling have you stumped on how you will entertain your children on long car rides? They can be miserable when your children are bored. Here are a few games to help pass the time and keep your sanity on these hot days and long family car trips! This familiar question of “how much longggeerrr?” is heard by moms and dads everywhere and fills them with dread as it is usually a signal their little ones are getting bored. Make it a stress-free car journey!

I Spy
“I spy with my little eye, something red.” This easy-to-learn game is perfect for preschoolers, and can keep them entertained for unbelievably long periods of time.  Choosing an object that they can see and giving them the first letter also helps with their spelling and encourages them to look around and take in the sights.

I’m Going on a Picnic
This alphabet-based memory game is great for kids 5 and up. You don’t need a game board or any materials. The game can be played with as few as two players, but it’s more fun when the whole family joins in. The first player says “I’m going on a picnic and I’m bringing…” followed by something that begins with A, such as apples. The second player repeats what the first person said, but adds something that begins with B. So she might say “I’m going on a picnic and I’m bringing apples and bananas.” And so on with C, D, and the rest of the alphabet. If someone forgets an item, she is out. To be fair, feel free to be lenient and give hints to younger players. The last player to be able to recite all the items on the list wins.

20 Questions
This easy-peasy game is great for younger kids, thanks to its straightforward rules. Player One thinks of a person, place or thing. Everyone else takes turns asking questions that can be answered with a simple yes or no. After each answer, the questioner gets one guess. Play continues until a player guesses correctly.

Telephone
This is great if there are a large number of people in the car, school trips being perfect. One person starts by whispering a sentence into their friend’s ear and it then goes all around the car with the last to hear required to repeat it to everyone else. It is very fun and shows how “rumors” can change very easily from one person to the next!

Treasure Hunt
This game is great fun for the kids and requires minimal interaction from you while on the journey, so you can concentrate on driving. Before leaving give each child a list of objects such as cow, sheep, red car, church, castle and ask them to mark each one off as and when they see it along the way. Of course, there will be a prize for each of them at the end of the journey if they have all succeeded in the task and it will keep them quiet for hours as their eyes will be glued to the window!

iPad or Kindle or Tablet
With the explosion of tablets on the market in the last few years many parents have invested in the new technology, some of which cost as little as $100. They are great to hand over to the kids before embarking on a long journey because they are packed full of games that will keep the kids busy. Most have an app store from which you can download several games beforehand with the kids, so they can simply access these on the go.

License Plate Game
When we were kids, everyone seemed to play the license plate game on family road trips. Armed with a pad of paper, we would write down the name of each state as we spotted it. The goal, of course, was to nab all 50 states. If we were lucky, we’d bag the Canadian provinces, too.

The game of silence
This one really works a treat and gives parents a few minutes of peace and quiet. Simply put, the child who can stay quiet the longest wins a treat. The longer they are quiet, the better the treat becomes. It could be considered bribery but, in a car full of screaming kids, anything goes!

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On the Road Again! Fun car games for the holiday weekend.

Memorial Day weekend is just around the corner and families will be travelling all over to visit their friends and find a bit of sun to kick off the summer. My parents refused to drive further than Los Angeles growing up (I am from the San Francisco Bay Area, California), but we found ways to pass the hours on the 6 hour car drive to “la-la-land.” Here are some fun ideas for you and your family up to age 7:

1. The Alphabet Game
Ages 5 and up: One person chooses the right-hand side of the road, and someone else the left. Each player looks for letters of the alphabet that appear on signs or license plates on their side. The object of the game is to point out all the letters of the alphabet in order, from A to Z. The first person to spot the entire alphabet wins.

2. The Animal Name Game
Ages 6 and up: One person names an animal. Then each person in order has to name another animal (no repeating!) that starts with the last letter of the previous animal named. There are no winners or losers in this game. With older children, try the game with TV shows, or geographical categories such as cities or countries.

3. Twenty Questions
Ages 4 and up: One person secretly thinks of either an animal, mineral, or vegetable. The other players then take turns asking yes-or-no questions, such as “Can it fly?” or “Does it grow in the ground?” After the players have asked 20 questions, each player gets a chance to make a guess.

4. Telephone
Ages 4 and up: A child whispers a story to someone else in the car. That person whispers the same story — as close to a word-for-word recount as possible — to a third person, and so on. The last person to hear the story repeats it out loud so everyone can hear. Invariably, some of the story will have been lost in the translation, and the resulting garbled message usually inspires a good laugh.

5. The Theme Song Game
Ages 5 and up: One person hums the tune to a favorite TV show, and everyone else tries to name the show as fast as possible. The first person to guess correctly hums the next song.

6. Memory Test
Ages 6 and up: The first person says “A is for —” filling in the blank with any word beginning with the letter A, such as “apple.” The second person comes up with a word for the letter B, such as “book,” but must also repeat the “A” word: “A is for apple, B is for book.” Continue through the alphabet, each person taking several turns and reciting more and more letters and words. By the time you reach the letter Z, that player will recite the whole alphabet and its corresponding words. However, if you’re playing with younger kids you may want to choose an earlier letter than “Z” to be the final one.

7. Secret Place Race
Ages 7 and up: One person looks at a road map and finds a small town, village, river, etc. That person announces the name of the place she has chosen. A second player has 60 seconds to look at the map and try to find the secret place.

8. Restaurant Race
Ages 5 and up: Each player chooses a restaurant, such as Burger King, Taco Bell, McDonalds, etc. Players earn points by spotting their restaurant off the road, on a billboard, on exit markers, on Food/Fuel signs, or by hearing it mentioned on the radio. Impose a time limit — say, 20 minutes — and then add up the points.

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Le Top Tip: Easy Road Trip Games for Kids and Adults

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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Road Trippin’ with Kids & Games

Planning a road trip for the Labor Day holiday? Traveling with kids and family? I know it’s not always easy keeping your children preoccupied in the car and trying to avoid the infamous question of “are we there yet?” I remember as a child, I would ask my mom where we were going and she would respond, “CRAZY!”

Here is a fun game for your pre-schoolers or toddlers on the road….

Travel/Car Scavenger Hunt 
Give each child a list of items to watch for while driving. Check off each item when they find it.  Think ahead about where you are travelling – its great to pick items that match the scenery or you can even make it a learning lesson! Just make the list ahead of time. For younger children who can’t yet read, it is sometimes easier if you draw a picture on a piece of paper with the words right next to the image so that he or she knows what to look for.

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