Car Travel - Part Six: Car Entertainment Bags

Only one more sleep until our road trip!  I've got a pile of bags sitting by the door ready to load up and go!  Whew!  The kids are excited, I'm excited, hubby excited...although both of us are a little wary of how all the prep for the car ride will go.  I hope we return with live children and we don't slaughter them on the way down to CA... ;)  (kidding of course!)

I have compiled an entertainment bag for each child.  One is 7 and the other is 3 at the time of this writing, so their needs and desires are different.  Besides the normal electronics (you know, stuff we didn't have when WE were traveling for long periods!) like DS player, DVD player, Mom and Dad's Kindles and iPods and smart phones...I wanted to "un-tether" them for stretches and torture them like I was tortured riding next to my brother.  I have divised a way to separate them (at least visually) from each other and in my test drives with the curtain, they are loving it.  We'll see how long it lasts for this drive!

But on to the car bags!

Here is the car bags in all of their glory.  We will be gone for 10 days and 6 of those will be on the road.  Hopefully, this will last us all 6 days.  The kids' initial bags are the pink and purple ones on the left of this picture.  They also will get the blue and pink binders and the 2 cookie sheets.  The large bag in the top right is Mom and Dad's bag (more on that below).

The little brown bags have a new toy or two for each leg of the trip (as well as a bonus bag on the day before Disneyland where they can dress up like Princesses with crowns, wands, and necklaces).  I've labled each bag with when to hand it out ("Sunday North" means the Sunday on our way home when we're headed north!).  Some blogs that I've seen similar ideas on suggest doing this every hour or every state, but I've decided to just go with a new bag a day.

The 7-year old's car bag...she's got tape, some word searches and a coloring book, crayons, and headphones.

The Journey Maps (which I described in greater detail here), start out the 7-year old's binder.  There are several plastic sheets to keep everything contained.  The following pictures of activities in her binder I printed from the online ebook "Ultimate Road Trip Games" which can be bought for $15 and downloaded immediately.  Personally, I could have created each of these, but the money spent was worth it to me in stress and time.  I highly recommend this ebook!

 Sound Scavenger Hunt, Road Scavenger Hunt

 

The 3-year old binder is a bit different.  She can't read or play standby games like the license plate game, so it was more of a challenge to fill hers up.  It opens with a pouch to hold her crayons and dot stickers and a coloring book in the first plastic sheet holder.

Next are some Alphabet and Number Dot pages (where she will use the stickers found in the beginning of the binder).  

The older girl has some color by number sheets as well, but I needed to find some that didn't have math problems and was more user-friendly for a 3-year old!.  I found these online after a simple search.

Finally, the grownups bag holds our kindles and our own entertainment as well as paperwork for the trip and a big fat file folder filled with extra sheets for the girls:

...more sheets of the games and printables for both of the girls - they didn't get ALL of the color by number sheets or the alphabet dots at once...hopefully this will stretch out the use during the whole trip.

So that's it.  We're off!  Pray for safe travels and a fun trip!

For the rest of the Car Travel Series:

Part One: Alphabet and Number Dots

Part Two: Alphabet Color By Number

Part Three: Journey Maps

Part Four: Car Pillow Tutorial

Part Five: Alphabet Magnets with Flash Cards - Preschool