Road Trip! Kid’s Entertainment on the Open Road
Thinking of hitting the road with young kids? I have a tried and true strategy for organizing car entertainment (copious and copious amounts of car entertainment). We regularly travel for 10+ hour long car rides with our toddler and preschooler and I have found that having lots of options at your fingertips can head off whining and boredom. Screen time can certainly come in handy as well. For some reason it doesn’t last long with our kids in the car. I am not sure why, but it has led us to come up with many other options to keep them busy on the road.
The first step is to gather your entertainment items. Every kid is different, but for my kids we typically go for:
Coloring books and crayons
Hidden picture activity books
Magnadoodles (yes, two of them. Refer back to trying to head off the whining :)
Melissa and Doug Water Wows and an Aquadoodle
Fabric activity book/paper dolls
High Five Magazines
Little cars
Books
Pin impression toy
An old wallet with empty gift cards or any other fake credit cards- great for younger toddlers!
Musical toys (last…and least- a necessary evil!)
My pile of car play toys
Once I have all of my options together, I organize them by type. The categories for us are: drawing toys that require crayons or markers, drawing toys that don’t (water wow, magnadoodles), books and magazines, and small toys and activities.
For ease of access, I also decant smaller things into a small carry case so that I can flip through and see what we have. It will also save the crayon box and crayons from being crushed…trust me.
It helps to keep like items together so that you can find what you are looking for when you’re traveling. I use small gift bags to organize all of the categories.
Ahhhh….ready to be loaded into the back seat of the car for easy toy access!
Oh right, one last thing to pack! Those musical toys. I hide them a bit inside the bag on the side. They are my lifesavers when crayons just can’t cut it, so I don’t want them too accessible.
So there you have it! An easily organized bag of car entertainment fun. Now, will it stay organized for an entire 10 hour car ride? Maybe not. But will it be easy to reorganize and reload at each rest stop? Yes!
Two more tips-
Our car toys stay hidden away at home and are only brought out for long car rides. This keeps them interesting and new for the kids and allows us to reuse the same toys, as they don’t have a chance to get stale.
Did your child receive a small toy, goodie bag, etc. that would be great for the car? Tuck it away if you can and add it to your car toy bag for later!
