Posts Tagged travel activities
Three Kids’ Travel Activities: Stickering, Journaling & Morphing
For my family’s seven-day, seven-state family road trip earlier this summer, I needed to be armed with some quality activities for the car. Sure, the kids had their Nintendos and iPods, but I knew there would be times when I’d want them to unplug, so here are three items I brought along, and our firsthand reports:
Stickers! and Incredible Stickers!: These colorful paperback books are simply charming and fun to flip through. I’m not surprised they were originally published in Japan, as some of the characters remind me of that chubby little Hello Kitty that is so popular among Japanese schoolchildren. In each, kids are encouraged to decorate a page spread with stickers found in the back of the book; stickers are sorted by color and numbered, as well, so the stickers intended for each page (say, candles for a birthday cake or mittens for snowmen) are labeled. Of course, there are no rules, and kids can decorate as they see fit!
I’m partial to the Incredible Stickers theme, where images of donuts become spaceships to detail, and a slice of bread becomes a house that is begging for colorful windows. Triangle-shaped sandwiches are mountain peaks and heads of broccoli are giant trees. The pages are super clever and little kids will find them super silly.
Preschoolers might need some help peeling and sticking, but these books are “play alone” activity for anyone over age five. In fact, I think kindergarteners are the ideal age for the sticker books. Still, my 8- and 10-year-olds got a kick out of the goofy scenarios, and from the back seat, while they were playing with them, I’d hear things like, “Look mom – the radishes are dancing!”
The books retail for $7.95 each on the Seven Footer Press website. I also found them on Amazon.com.
Children’s Travel Journal: My tween-age daughter fell in love with this spiral-bound, black-and-white diary on sight. She’s a “fill in the blanks” type of kid, and was pleased to find that she didn’t have to “write from scratch” on each page. Instead, she drew pictures and filled in a calendar of the dates that we’d be gone, and answered questions about “why we chose this destination” and “what I’m most looking forward to.”
While on the trip, she detailed a page titled “Landmarks” about our trip to St. Louis’ Gateway Arch, and on the “Museum and Galleries” page she wrote about our excursion to Oklahoma City’s National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. Opposite these topic-centric pages are blank pages for writing and sketching. I like that the pages are made from cardstock and the cover is clear plastic with an elastic fastener — the book is meant to last, since it’s preserving important vacation memories.
One caveat: This journal seems like it would best fit a child who is traveling to a foreign country, since it has a world map inside to trace the route of the trip, an area to jot down the currency exchange rate, and a section to write translations for common words like “hello,” “good-bye” and “where’s the bathroom.” Still, my daughter enjoyed filling in the blanks where it was appropriate on our U.S. vacation.
The book is available for $15 on The Little Bookworm website.
Morph-O-Scopes Packets: My art-project-loving daughter also had fun with this activity, where you color a “morph” — a thoroughly distorted black and white image — and then place a curved Mylar mirror on top of it to reflect the “correct” picture. See at right, where it’s hard to tell what the heck you’re coloring on the page, but the picture appears as clear as day in the “cup” above. To figure out where exactly you’re coloring, you need to look at the cup, but put your crayon on the paper. The optical illusion requires a bit of hand-eye coordination and brain power, for sure.
My kids used their own crayons and markers with the “Stretched Pets” packet, which came with five morphed coloring pages and a self-hooking mirror “decoder,” all packaged in a clear plastic hanging bag. (Fairies and dinosaurs are two other themes.) But you can also buy Morph-O-Scopes Kits, which come with 32 activity pages — mazes and games, in addition to the coloring pages — as well two mirror decoders and 16 crayons, all in a carrying case.
The Morph-O-Scopes Packets sell for $7.99 and the Morph-O-Scopes Kits for $19.99 on the manufacturer’s website.
More kids’ travel activities:
Posted by Kara in Kids and Family on July 30th, 2010
Would You Rather…? Crazy Question Books for Kids
Last week I covered an educational travel activity workbook for kids. This week, it’s all about having fun. There’s no educational merit here (unless you consider any and all reading to be educational — from the Sunday comics to cereal boxes — and I do).
The Would You Rather…? series of books from Seven Footer Press each contain more than 300 questions designed to promote conversation, entice giggles, and in some instances, bring on a bit of nausea. That is, if you have a weak stomach and two silly kids in the backseat of your car reading questions from the “Doubly Disgusting” and “Gross-Out” editions ($9.95). For example, on our recent multi-state road trip, everyone in the car had to answer:
- Would you rather have 20-inch nostril hair or 20-inch-long toenails?
- Would you rather suck in air with the force of a vacuum when yawning or have blow-dryer strength farts?
- Would you rather lick your friend’s chicken pox or use Tabasco sauce eye drops?
- Would you rather suck every drop of sweat from the socks of the Dallas Cowboys after a game or eat a sandwich wrap made from shedded snake-skin filled with a mixture of fingernail clippings?
Just typing that last one made my stomach turn. But they’re not all totally nasty questions. Consider these sort-of silly ones:
- Would you rather have glow-in-the-dark veins or only be able to watch one TV show for the rest of your life: Dora the Explorer.
- Would you rather be able to fly, but only see in black and white or be able to be invisible, but lose the ability to see and taste?
Scintillating stuff! Who thinks of these questions anyway? Actually, your kids can write their own in the spaces provided at the end of these paperback books. That’s always fun — trying to come up with your own bizarre scenarios.
Plus, each book has funny cartoons illustrating some of the crazy, hypothetical situations presented. One drawing of a kid flying through Burger King (don’t ask) prompted huge belly laughs from my kids. Weeks later, when either of them says “Burger King” in a funny voice, they erupt in laughter.
And frankly, any travel activity that brings on laughs while helping to pass the time on a long car ride gets a huge thumb’s up from me. I’d recommend these two Would You Rather…? books for children any day of the week. Also see the “BFF” version ($9.95) for high-school-age girls, and decidedly grown-up versions, too, like the, er, “Ultimate Sex Edition” ($12.95) which contains “more than 700 ludicrously lustful dilemmas to ponder.”
Browse all options at Seven Footer Press and look for discounts at Amazon.com.
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Posted by Kara in Kids and Family on July 2nd, 2010
Summer Learning Workbooks for Kids
Like many parents, when I road-trip with my children, I keep a bag of stashed activities, games, books and puzzles that I pull out to allay boredom when the kids start asking too often, “Are we there yet?!” Sometimes the activities are meant purely for entertainment, but more often than not, I try to throw in some educational ones, too.
The Summer Bridge Activities workbooks from Carson Dellosa Publishing fall decidedly into the “learning category,” of travel activities for kids. Children may not find them as fun as making friendship bracelets or playing travel bingo in the backseat, but this mom thinks they are brilliant to help kids learning during a three-month-long summer break.
Each book, which is 160 pages long, is geared to “bridge” the gap between school grades. They are designed for kids from preschool to eighth grade, to help them maintain the skills they have learned in the previous year, and help them prep for the following school year. Generally, kids complete two activity pages a day, which might take them 15 minutes. Activities cover a range of subjects, including reading, writing and math (for my 8-year-old, that’s addition and subtraction; for my 10-year-old it’s multiplication, fractions and geometry).
Bottom line: I absolutely love these books. I volunteer at my kids’ school a lot, and time and time again, I hear from teachers and administrators that children truly lose some of the strides they’ve made in learning when they don’t keep their brains active in the summer months. Reading books from the public library is great; but reviewing important academic standards — even just a few minutes a day — is so key.
My kids don’t rush to complete their daily workbook pages right after breakfast, and they’ve negotiated with me not to do any pages on the weekends. But once they get started with their weekday “work,” they have fun with it. Favorite pages have included word searches, reading maps and charts and fixing misspelled words. Both kids are good at math, so they whip through “worksheet” pages that contain rows of problems.
Books are priced at $14.95, and can be found in bookstores or on Amazon.com ($13.95). If your child only needs to work on reading or math, you can purchase these single-subject workbooks; they retail for $8.95.
Posted by Kara in Kids and Family on June 25th, 2010
Table Topics To Go
The premise is simple: provide a list of open-ended conversation starters to promote dialogue among strangers… or even family members who live together, but who might not know intimate details or odd quirks about one another. That’s what Table Topics sets out to do with its clear cubes of 135 question cards; plop the box on a dinner table and let the conversations fly.
But when you’re on the road, these 4-inch acrylic cubes aren’t that easy to transport (and the easy-off tops make it easy for the cards to slip out). That’s where the “on the go” version comes in: they are 40 cards that slip into a plastic case and they aren’t much bigger than a deck of cards.
Topics are in themes — there are conversation starters for a honeymoon (I know, oxymoron) and some specifically to pull out at a picnic or tailgate. I have the Kids Table Topics To Go, and the cards offer questions for the whole family: “If you could be a super hero, which special power would you choose to have?” and “What do you love most about yourself?”
Some questions are a little silly and some are more poignant and thought provoking, but the bottom line is, these cards promote conversation, for sure.
The Table Topics To Go are $9 each for 40 cards. We whipped through the Kids’ questions quickly, and when my son tried to “re-ask” the questions on day 2 of a multi-state road trip, he was met with a resounding chorus of, “We did this already!’ from the rest of us. So, you could re-use the cards with extended family or friends, but once you’ve gone through the cards among your immediately family, you’re done.
Are they worth $9? It might be easier to just write up a bunch of conversation starters on your own index cards (which you can buy at the grocery store for $1.99). That said, for a novelty gift — they come in bachelorette and wedding shower themes — I think they’re great. These would also make fine stocking stuffers, too. For travel activities, specifically, check out the travel and road trip editions.
Posted by Kara in Kids and Family on June 11th, 2010
