Educational Activities to Pack for Kids When You Travel

Guest Blogger #393, Entry #988, March 1, 2012

Traveling with family these days is a stressful event to begin with. High prices will greet you whether you board a plane or opt to skip across the country by car. And you’ll either face long lines, searches, delays, cramped seats, and possibly even lost luggage, or you’ll have to deal with hours of boredom as you watch mile after mile of unchanging landscape slide past your window. But when you throw kids into the mix you add a whole other set of headaches. They need to be fed, entertained, and contained, no matter how you choose to travel. And if you let them, they’ll probably text their friends and play FPS downloads day and night. So here are just a few educational diversions that will make your travel time fly by and expand their young minds in the process.

Educational kids activities to keep them entertained

Image via: Diane Gottsman

1.     Mad Libs.

This word game will help your kids to brush up on the parts of a sentence (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on) while creating humorous narratives to delight the whole family. It’s one of the easiest ways to get kids learning without letting them know what you’re up to and it can provide hours of fun on a long road trip.

2.     Scrabble app.

Kids can get bored with old-school board games, so spice up the concept with the mobile edition of this classic word game. While Words with Friends will clearly get you booted off the airplane, a friendly game of Scrabble played on the iPad will keep kids diverted while helping them to expand their vocabulary (although you will still have to power down your mobile device during take-off and landing). You can also download other throwbacks that come with educational features hidden amidst the fun, like Monopoly (counting, budgeting) and Trivial Pursuit (although this would have to be for older kids since there is no junior version), as well as new additions to the board game marketplace like Pictureka (a memory and association game).

3.     Books.

Reading is always an educational activity, even if the content of the book isn’t terribly informative. While you can certainly load kids down with books on topics as diverse as history, science and nature, and so on, even allowing them to read the fictional stories they love (Lemony Snicket, Captain Underpants, and so on) will help to improve vocabulary and reading comprehension. And you can always throw in some classic kids’ stories for various levels of reading ability.

Subside the “are-we-there-yet” blues…

Image via: The Whimsical Fig.Blogspot

4.     Storytelling.

This is a fun game for the whole family and it will get everyone thinking outside the box. One person starts a story with the traditional “Once upon a time…” and then the story passes from person to person with each one supplying the next line of the story. If you want to make it a little more topical, try incorporating elements of your trip, like road signs, topography, or the characteristics of travelers in other cars. It’s not rocket science, but there are worse ways to spend a trip than by encouraging your kids to be creative.

5.     Clue.

Your kids may not be quite ready to tackle criminal justice degrees online, but that doesn’t mean they can’t figure out whodunit with this game that promotes deductive reasoning skills. Your best bet is to get the travel version of this game since the original board is too bulky to pack and the iPhone version of the game got panned.

For more family ideas on Stagetecture, click here.