Traveling with kids can be a challenge on the best of days. “Are we there yet?” and siblings fighting can be an issue to say the least. There are many ways to deal with these issues and one of them is by making sure you can keep the kids busy!
Try This Great New Game!
Car trip Seek & Snap is an easy game for pre-schoolers on up!
Items Required:
- Something to take photos with! (Cell phone camera, ipad camera, digital camera, 3DS camera etc…)
- Day Light is helpful!
RULES:
Someone comes up with three things for the child playing to seek outside the car, then the child has to remember those 3 things and take photos of them when they find them! If more than one child is playing be sure each child has their own camera or have them work together taking turns! If the kids each have their own camera the child to get the 3 images first wins and then 3 new objects are asked for and the kids seek to find them. Nothing in the car counts!
Examples of things to seek:
- Red Truck
- White Car
- Square Sign
- Orange Traffic Cone
- Motorcycle
- Boat
- Bridge
- tunnel
- flower
- The number 3
- A word
- Flag
- Smoke
- Someone walking
- Animal
- Plane
- Trash
- Cloud
- Water
- Cement Truck
- Police Car
- Something purple
There are so many options and you’re only limited by your imagination. With especially young children start very simply with colored cars and big objects!
We love this car trip game!
Today my children found themselves stuck in the van for 9 hours. We started this game with our 13 year old daughter, 7 year old son, and 5 year old daughter all using their 3DS hand held game systems. The cameras on them are not very good though. While it worked, our oldest soon pulled out her own digital camera, then our 5 year old’s DS batteries died and she ended up with my iPhone 4 and liked taking photos with it better. Our son now wants his own camera to play this game with. The kids played over and over hunting for different things and helping one another find the objects my husband and I asked them to remember and take photos of. They where happy and busy and the trip went so smoothly because of it.
One of the things the kids searched for was the number 3, this photo is one our 5 year old snapped with my iPhone. She was very pleased with how clear it came out. I had not even thought about numbers on trucks before she showed me her photo, I had thought about license plates and highway signs. She did a specially great job on this game.
Homeschooling Applications:
This game can fit well into homeschooling, it can be turned into a travel photo diary. The game can also be played on field trips and the images used later in homeschool projects. For field trips parents can think about what they would like the child to focus on, they can print a page with specific things they want the child to take photos of or request things that a child needs to figure out such as “An animal that is awake at night” or “A fish that starts with the letter G” or “Something made before the 1960’s”.
Be sure to also check out homeschool blogs that have fantastic field trip ideas!
