Road Trip Boredom Busters

Last week we were on vacation, which was great. I'll fill you in more later this week. Once we are there, it's always great, it's the getting there that can be tough. Now that Grant doesn't take a nap each day that means more time in the car and more opportunities to get bored...then drive us crazy. We have a DVD player and Grant has in Ipad, but both of these entertain him for maybe an hour, and when we have seven hours in the car that leaves a lot of time. 

I decided to try to make it easier on everyone by creating some Boredom Buster activities to help keep Grant happy and entertained during the drive.

I didn't want to buy a bunch of things, so what you'll see is about $10 in supplies from Hobby Lobby and Dollar Tree, which a bunch left over for other activities later this summer.

Here's what I bought for creating the activities:

-Goggly eyes $1

-Beads $1

-Felt $2

-Pom poms $.89

-Pipe Cleaners $1

-Craft Glue $2

-Read to make craft $1

Here's what I had:

-Legos

-Bins for storage

-scissors

-baggies

Treats I added:

-Pop Rocks $1

-Suckers (had)

-Push pops (had)

-Button Candy (had)

-Pez (had)

Now to the activites! Some I found on Pinterest, and I'll link to them, others I created. The first is this fun mix and match monster activity. I loved the idea of this, and scaled it down to an 8 1/2 x 11 piece of felt. Creating the monsters took maybe an hour, and everything is mix and match, so Grant can make the monsters look however he would like. I stored this is a gallon sized baggie.

Now, I wanted most of the activities to be simply "fun,"  but stumbled across this pipe cleaner counting activity and knew Grant would like it. Getting the activity ready took less than ten minutes and I knew if would be great for fine motor skills too.  I also stored this in a baggie.

There are also a lot of pins on Pinterest for pipe cleaner puppets. I put a bunch of different supplies in a baggie for Grant and make one example for him too. Really anything goes with these puppets. I did buy a craft glue pen to include with this activity too, it depends on the age of your kids if that would work for you or not. Grant made them, I glued them, then they sat for about a half hour before he could play with them,

Here's the glue pen and I added in Grant's scissors too, just in case. I found this paddle on sale for $1 and grabbed it too. I knew Grant would have fun playing with it once to got to the lake.

This was one of my favorite finds, these LEGO animals. There are twenty six total-one for each letter of the alphabet. For the trip I decided to make the animals first, then separate them into groups of four, so Grant would get this one direction sheet and the corresponding baggie. Now, this took about two hours for me to get ready, but it was super helpful and make it easy for the car. If we were at home, Grant and I probably would have just dug though the bin together to make them, but that wouldn't work for the car very well. I will say, Grant like these, but he didn't get to them all. I probably could have done just a few of the animals instead of all of them. I'm sure we'll work to build the rest at home.

I knew Grant would like the idea of the creating your own monsters, so when I came across printable for making your own robots, I thought I'd add it too. Now, she suggested printing on magnet paper, which we didn't have, although I like that idea. Instead I printed it onto cardstock. Then, I added velcro with an adhesive back to the robot parts, which sticks pretty nicely to felt. It took a while to cute these pieces out, but Grant really like them.

As Grant is a big fan of LEGOs, I decided to grab a pencil case and glue a work space for building on the lid, then fill it up with random pieces, like wheels, different sized bricks, mini-figures, etc.

I also added some snacks that would take a while to eat too. I'd stored some of this away at home and added it.

Everything fit in a shoe box sized bin, which made it easy for me to keep up front with me, then pass different activities to Grant as he was ready.

You're probably wondering how he'd get to do all of these in the car without making a huge mess, well, I picked up this green lap desk at Hobby Lobby, It was $13, but I used a 40% off coupon, so it was only $8. They have a bunch on Amazon like this one if you don't have a Hobby Lobby near you. I also grabbed a tray from our kitchen with a nice edge. Grant could set that on top of his lap desk when doing activities, so the pieces stayed in one place. A cookie sheet would work just fine for this too. I ended up laying down an extra piece of felt to keep the little pieces from moving all around on the tray, that make working much easier.

Having all of these things ready to go made the car trip so much more enjoyable....for all of us. What about you? Anything you like to do in the car to keep your kids from going stir crazy?