When holiday season is on the horizon you may be dreading the thought of hours in a hot car with small children on your way to visit the in-laws. How will you keep the children entertained and stop the dreaded questions, “Are we there yet?”… “How much further?”… “Can we stop now?” Your children may be old enough to play some simple games in the car now, spotting things out of the windows to take their mind off the length of the journey.

‘I Spy’ is an old favourite and can be played a few different ways. You can play the traditional way with letters, or you can play it with colours, for example “I Spy something blue”. Alternatively you can divide the passengers into two teams and all players agree on what object you will all look for. The team that spots the object first calls out “I Spy” and gets to choose the next object.

‘The next car...’ is played by guessing the colour of the next car to come along. The winner is the one who gets the correct colour. This is particularly good on back roads!

‘The wheelbarrow game’ is simply spotting wheelbarrows as you go along (not as easy as it sounds). The person who spots the most wheelbarrows wins. Hint: look out for DIY stores and garden centres as they often have them displayed in the carpark!

‘Guess how many…’ is played by picking an object (for example, red cars) and everyone guesses how many of the object you will see before the next time you stop. The winner is the person who guesses closest to the number counted.

‘Picnic Basket’ is a memory game where the first player starts by saying, “In my picnic basket I packed a …” and completes the sentence with a food. The next player repeats what the previous player said and adds another food item to the list. The game continues until a player forgets the order of the items in the picnic basket.

• For younger children, don’t get them to repeat the list, just get them to add a new item
• For a different challenge make the list alphabetical

‘License Plate Alphabet’ is played by reading the license plates of cars to spot the letters of the alphabet in the order A to Z (or Z to A for a change).

• For older kids, you can get them to add up the numbers on a license plate – e.g. for a plate “ABC123”, add the 1, 2 and 3 together

‘Bingo’ can be played with a little preparation. Find pictures of objects like different animals, signs, vehicles, buildings etc you will see on your journey. Make some boards with squares on and randomly put in the pictures (9 pictures in a 3 x 3 format works well). Hand them out in the car and the children have to match the objects they see to their card. The first person to cross off all the objects calls out “Bingo!”  and is the winner!

• A variation is “License Plate Bingo” where you randomly fill the squares with a number from 0 to 9. For older children, you can increase the number of squares and add in letters too.

As the adult, remember ‘it’s only a game’ – and if all else fails, revert to talking books or songs on CD!

Endorsed by our New World Nutritionist  ||   Proudly Partnering with Parents Centre

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