Games and Tips to Keep Kids Busy on a Road Trip

June 23, 2021 | Guylaine Bergeron | Réédité le 9 juin 2021

Summer at last! The time has finally come to go on vacation… The morning of departure is always an exhilarating time, whether you’re going camping for the weekend or planning to spend a week by the sea or at the cottage. It will be fantastic… but you have to get there first! The problem is that your little family has to sit through 6 hours of driving. So how do you keep your kids busy for the entire trip without overdoing it with the tablet computers?

Prior to departure

First, kids old enough to do so should organize their own backpack and prepare their personal kit – a task that should keep them busy for a while. Getting your personal pack ready is part of the fun of going on vacation.

Plan a trip to the library a few days before leaving to stock up on picture books for the toddlers, children’s novels for the new readers, and comic strips for the older kids. And hands off until the trip begins…

Car games

Spending 6 hours with mom and dad is a great opportunity to have some fun together. Here are a few suggestions:

With a small magnetic board (2120442) and dry-erase crayons (1170943), the children can draw or play classic games such as tic-tac-toe, hangman, dots and boxes, and a few word games.
Question and answer games: e.g. Professeure Caboche Collection (French only). There are tons of games for all tastes on a host of topics.
Tricky Fingers (2186440).
Hangman.

The last two are examples of products that make great car games. There are games you can play in a car that require no batteries or pencils!

Car-friendly games

Be creative! Organize a tournament and play at riddles. Here are a few classics:

When I go to the market– The goal is to complete the sentence “When I go to the market, I put in my cart…” with the name of a food product.
Neither yes nor no– This game needs no introduction…
Look for– The goal is to find an object, an animal or a color outside the car.
From A to Z– Be the first to go through all 26 letters of the alphabet in the right order by identifying objects (that begin with a specific letter) other passengers can see outside the car.

There are several other versions of these games and many more car-friendly games. Do you have other car-friendly games to suggest?

Breaks and rest areas

You can take a pause from playing games by stopping for a surprise snack. Roadside stops allow everyone to stretch their legs and burn their excess energy. All you need to do is find a bit of turf and pull out the soccer ball you remembered to throw inside the trunk.

Six hours just flew by. And to say you thought the trip would never end!