Travel Games to Fight Off Boredom

Setting out on a roadtrip with five children without any travel games is like submitting ourselves to all the foreseeable consequences of a raging hurricane.

That is exactly why we are trying to avoid these situations by taking as many different travel games with us as we possibly can. There’s but one thing that keeps me from taking the whole the total content of the children’s room and cramming it into the car: the fact that if we all get into the car there’s hardly any space left in it.

In our life as a large family, there has been two occasions where significant improvement occured: first, when after a renovation of our house the one shared children’s room was transformed into four separate ones; and second, when we purchased a car. The main reason for the latter one was that we couldn’t carry all the luggage needed for trips, especially while we simultaniously needed to carry the children on our necks because they got fed up with walking.

So we bought a car and thought that with this all our problems would be solved and and all we’d have to do during family trips was to relax. Just what two naive parents would think. Never before have we undertaken such a difficult task –well, except when we decided to have five children. We never imagined it would be easy, neither did we realize it would be this difficult- because keeping almost half a dozen kids occupied on a car trip longer that a couple of minutes is the ultimate challenge of being a parent.

The root of the problem

Besides the fact that children, by nature, have a more difficult time enduring a long car ride than adults, my kids aren’t quite what you’d call the houseplant type, they really crave physical activity. Let’s face it, this is a clear disadvantage of travelling in a car, plus BigGirl gets ’seasick’ from time to time.
Given is a vehicle with limited capacity, five children with varied tastes and two parents who can fairly quickly get annoyed by the events taking place on the two rows of seats to the back of the car.
For the sake of our nervous system’s preservation only noiseless –noise is there by default, we try not to increase it if not neceassary-, preferably flat or at least small and collapsible games can be considered. Taking into account all the negative factors not too many contestants remain, those that do, however, may be quite boring (e.g. pencil and paper). This is the point where partental creativity enters, something which should to be an inexhaustible source for one with five children. (Source. Source.)

Tic tac toe in the bag

Ingredients

• Fabric Tape
• natural/light single-color textile bag (I used on with 13×18 cm size)
• 2×40 cm colorful ribbon
• 8-10 pieces glass beads in two colors

Preparation

• cut four pieces of the fabric tape, each with a lenght 1 cm shorter that the width of the bag
• consider their exact place and put stick them on after taking the safety layer off them.
• strongly push the strips onto the (use flatiron through a layer of cloth for better adhesion)
• sew the ribbon used for closing the bag into its neck
• don’t forget about the glass beads

A piece of advice

• the bag is so simple that it can even be made out of leftover materials in a short time with minimal expenses (alternatively use a nice mother-in-law to sew it for you like I did)
• painted pebbles, buttons or simple cardboard discs can be used intead of glass beads (as long as they form two easily distinguishable groups)
• a few color pencils, a rubber, and even a few pieces of paper fits in the bag

Even though my children think the pencil and paper combination is boring, I don’t reject the idea, it just has to be presented properly… for instance in a form of a cool puzzle.

For further paper-based game ideas CLICK HERE or on the picture above.

Have a pleasant journey and a good game!