Travel Bingo
Easy to Make Travel Games
Traveling can be hard enough as it is, but add in a couple kids and a 12 hour drive to the mix, you’ll definitely need a few activities to keep the children from killing each other, bothering you the entire time, or being faced with a wall of boredom. Prepare yourself by printing and gathering some easy travel activities beforehand. All you need is a working computer, some time to search for printables on Google or Bing, and a printer with fully loaded ink cartridges. Either way, you don’t need a long road trip planned to play these games, you can use these games for a 3 hour plane ride or even a short car ride. Just have them handy in your bag to keep your kids constantly busy and entertained for any occasion.
Tic Tac Toe & Lines and Dots
The classic old game of Tic Tac Toe and Lines and Dots. Yes, you could just have blank sheets of paper ready to have your kids draw new grids and dots every game, but it might motivate them a little more to actually play the game if you printed out the grids and assembled them in a book or packet. You could even make a laminated version of the grids and equip your kids with some dry erase markers so they can keep reusing the board. No time or resources to do the laminating process? Then you can just simply slip the game board inside a plastic zipper bag to perform the same function as a laminated card.
Travel Scavenger Hunt & Trav
The idea for both games is the same. Find what’s on the list or board and cross it off. The scavenger hunt list is pretty self-explainable as far as hunting for the items on the checklist and checking off what has been seen. You play the bingo games by marking off what you see on the game board until you get ‘BINGO!’ So, if you see a plane pass by then the space with the airplane on it should be marked off. Keep going until someone wins. If you’re visiting a specific location, you can find tailored bingo games to that destination online. For example, if you were heading to Utah, get a bingo card made for the monuments of Utah. It’s a good idea to make the bingo boards reusable by laminating or sticking them in plastic bags. That way after someone wins; they could keep on playing new rounds. Just don’t forget to keep the dry erase markers
handy.
Classic Game Booklet
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Put together a game booklet filled with all the classic games such as crossword puzzles, word searches, mazes, sudoku pages, word scrambles, etc. All you have to do is take a little bit of time to look for them online, but the possibilities are endless! And since you can customize exactly what goes in, you can tailor the books based on your child’s age. This is great if you have multiple children since everyone will have different
levels of ability.
Mad Libs
Do you remember filling in these things with random and funny words? This is a great activity for your kids to really dig through their vocabulary and grammar knowledge. If you search for them on the Internet, there are a bunch of websites that have free Mad Libs templates. Gather these up and make a booklet or go ahead and make them reusable too.
Name Brand Car Search
Another car game to make is a car brand search game. The goal is to try to cross off as many different brands of cars as you can that you pass on the road. Make enough printables for everyone in the car and make it a contest to see who notices the most number of different cars. It’s also great to put in a plastic sleeve and start a new game every time you get in the car.
Hidden Picture Printables or Find the Difference Print Outs
Hidden Picture and Find the Difference Print Outs are fun to have and will keep your kids entertained for a while. For the hidden picture prints, they should try to find the hidden pictures. Once they find each hidden item, color it in. After all the pictures are found, they can go ahead and color in the rest of the picture. When playing find the difference, circle the differences in each photo then color in. Don’t forget to have crayons or markers on hand.
License Plate Game
Another fun game to print out for a car ride is a license plate guide with all 50 states. As you’re driving along, check out all the license plates on the cars that pass by, and when you see a state, cross it off your list. See if you can get all 50 states. I have a feeling Alaska and Hawaii would be the rarest, at least if you live in the contiguous 48. Put these in a plastic sleeve and organize them along with your other printouts in a binder. You could store the binder in the car and have the kids pull it out anytime they’re bored. The plastic sleeves allow the activities to be reusable, again, with a dry erase marker. If you go with the binder idea, buy a pencil pouch that goes along in a binder too and store your markers in there.
Make an entire book with all the games inside or ask your kids to pick out which ones they like best and put together the favorites. Try to make reusable game boards whenever possible to minimize paper waste and using up all your printer ink. Who says you need to go out and buy more games and books when you can easily make them at home with your printer saving you money and the time of going out to the store.
This post was brought to you by Tina, a major contributor for 123 Inkjets, the leading discount retailer of
printer ink online. On her free time she likes to scrapbook, go outside with her dachshund, and read.
Instead of buying activity books, try making one yourself. You can tailor it to your kids age and by what kind of characters or theme they want. For instance, if your child loves superheroes, you could compile various superhero printables like word searches, connect-the-dots pages, coloring pages, mazes, etc. based on their age, and staple them together like a book. If they complete the whole book, then you don’t have to worry about adding it to your grocery list, you just have to print out another book.
This might bring back bits of nostalgia, but paper dolls are still around. Once more, just search for paper dolls online and you’ll get a result of thousands of dolls. Some are already colored, but you can find paper doll templates that are blank allowing you and your child to decorate them. If paper dolls aren’t as appealing, how about making finger puppets? There are a lot of different themed finger puppets on the Internet. All you have to do is color them in, cut them out, and cut finger holes or attach a paper ring/popsicle stick on it so you can hold the puppets. You can put on a show for the whole family. If it becomes a regular family activity, try making a finger puppet theatre to pull “the show” together.
This post was brought to you by Tina, a major contributor for 4Inkjets.com, the leading provider of discounted ink cartridges. On her free time she likes to read, do scrapbooking projects, and go outside with her dachshund.
