Keeping Things Fun On Long Drives: A Childrens Game Guide

If youre driving long distances to be with relatives this Christmas

, and you have young children with you, youll already know that making sure they are comfortable and entertained is a difficult thing indeed. However, if youve got a little time on your hands before setting off, there are several inexpensive ways of ensuring that those quiet, busy times are pushed to their full, before its necessary to make a stop. These ideas vary widely with a childs age, but well go from toddler age up to ten, to give as wide a spectrum of ideas as possible.

Colouring Books: Colouring books almost go hand in hand with car journeys for kids, and, especially before tiredness sets in you can pretty much rely on these to shave an hour off the journeys idle time. A good way to recap on what theyre learning in school at that time is to incorporate that theme into a colouring book simple, colourable images of whats on their curriculum should do the trick using a mono printer. Using a printer means you can makes lots of copies really cheaply.

Little Travel Writer: For slightly older children, this is a good trick to occupy them with something interesting and immediate. Give them a special notebook and pencil, and tell them you want them to tell the story, with pictures, of the journey, like a travel writer would. They can write about what they see and how they feel on the journey, adding time of day and the current weather and other specifics.

Songs: These are probably lacking in popularity these days, but children love songs of all kinds, and in the car they can eat up a lot of time otherwise spent crying or feeling otherwise dissatisfied. The best songs for these situations are not the school-room ones, which children rarely wish to sing in strange environments. Think about adventure songs, sea shanties and songs with funny or elaborate verses, and print a driving songbook for the children to be in charge of, teaching you the chorus each time. Keep telling yourself that off-key singing is better than all-out screaming.

Map Games: With a little effort, children can be excited by the idea of travel when they are involved themselves. In general, children feel cut off from whats going on around them, which is probably why they tire so much quicker in travelling. A fun game to play with children is to give them a print-out route-planner map, and ask them to give you directions. Depending on the age of the child, you can invent a whole range of dramatic episodes: pretending to think youre going the wrong way, asking if the next town is called something totally different as many scenarios as you think theyll be understand and be entertained by, and will be able to correct you on.

The inside of a car is a pretty boring place to have nothing to do inside of, no matter what age you are. These are just some ideas to make things interesting for your children, and to allow them to be creative and to enjoy themselves while ignoring the restraints and the demands on their patience being made by the journey. Hopefully, these will snowball once you try out a few, and youll have the best strategy devised to prevent them driving you up the wall while youre driving them to see grandma.

by: katie

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