Activity of the Month

August 2010

Travel Games

Traveling this summer? Try out these fun car games to keep the kids happy and the parents sane…

Our family has been traveling a lot more than usual this summer. Between vacation, trips with our church and visiting family, we have spent about 50% of our summer on the road. My son is 5, and I’m the first one to admit that our portable DVD player is my sanity, but I don’t want him to be glued to it for the entire 12 hours it takes to arrive at the grandparents. I decided to search the internet for some fresh ideas, and I came across a great article about car games on www.littlescholarsllc.com. Little Scholars is a company locally owned by Mom of 3 Stephanie Jefferson. Stephanie will be a speaker at one of our upcoming workshops in the “Celebrating our Children” workshop series at Rainbow Station in Mechanicsville this fall.
If your family will be traveling like ours in the next month, check out this excerpt from Stephanie’s article about how to keep kids entertained, and their little minds stimulated on long road trips;

Bingo!
We are all traveling this summer and if your children are like mine they get tired of the DVDs pretty quickly. How about a game of car bingo! Print off the bingo sheets from http://www.momsminivan.com and give each child a pencil. The first person to fill their card gets to pick the lunch spot!

Letter Magnetism!
Take a metal baking sheet and magnetic letters on your next road trip. Take turns calling out sight words, words that start with "c", animals, etc., and see how many words can you spell correctly?

Guess that Letter
One child holds out his hand and closes his eyes while the other child "writes" on his hand with her finger. The first child has to guess what the second child is writing. You can do this with letters, numbers, shapes, words.

Simple Vocab Building Questions
This game is so easy!  Simply ask your child a question such as "What is round and bounces?" for younger students; and as they get older challenge them by asking questions like, "email is to internet, as card is to what?" or "how many words can you think of that mean beautiful?"

Rhyming Games
Here's how it goes:  "This is an animal that rhymes with ten.  What is it?...Hen!"

Skip Counting
Practice skip counting for math facts by 2's, 3's, 5's and 10's.  Challenge your star student by starting with a number other than 1.  "Count by 2's starting with the number 21." 

20 Questions
We love when a parent can tie a letter and vocabulary all together.  Ask your child to figure out what thing you are thinking about and tell them what letter is starts with.  For example, "I am thinking of a vegetable that starts with the letter 'c'." The child then has a chance to ask up to 20 questions to figure out the answer. (Hint: For a younger child, you may want to use more than one clue and limit the number of questions to 10. For the older child, less clues and 20 questions.)