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Getting Ready for a Road Trip? These Ideas May Help

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We don’t really have any travel to speak of planned this summer, and my daughter is old enough that any lengthy time in the car is usually spent with an audiobook or watching videos. But I remember the struggle of keeping little kids entertained on long trips, especially if you don’t want them on a screen the whole time.

I recently saw this post from Creating Really Awesome Fun Things, which is a roundup of 26 road trip games, ideas and activities that kids can do. From stringing beads onto pipe cleaners to felt busy boards, travel journals and using a pizza box to contain colors, trains (or cars) and more, there are lots of fun and easy ideas here.

I’m a big fan of printable road trip activities, and even have a whole post all about printables for road trips. I used to always do some kind of license plate game, a map, mazes and I-spy style scavenger hunts, which are fun for everyone in the car to play along with. (You can also find some patriotic road trip mazes here.) If your road trip includes a camping trip, check out these camping themed printable games and activities.

Productive Pete has a super cute map of the United States (pictured above) that kids can use in lots of different ways while on the road. They can color the states you travel through, or all the states they’ve ever visited, or use it to give the license plate game an extra challenge as they try to find each state on the map. You can quiz older kids on the state capitols, which you might need to brush up on yourself (guilty!).

Do you have particular games or activities that you always have on hand when you are doing a road trip with kids? I would love to hear about them!

[Photo: Productive Pete.]

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Fall Literacy Activities

Bring on the fall leaves, pumpkins and apples as we help little ones learn to recognize letters and get ready for reading with these fall literacy activities.

Practice letter recognition by feeding the scarecrow straw with the letters of the alphabet with this printable activity from ABCs of Literacy. It includes both uppercase and lowercase letters so you can practice with either or match them as you “feed” the scarecrow.

Match the letters on fall leaves with the letters on the worksheet to play leafy letter match from The Kindergarten Connection. Kids can color in the leaves they find or cover them with dot markers.

Or do the same thing with this free pumpkin color the alphabet activity using lowercase letters. It’s from The Kinder Life on Teachers Pay Teachers.

Work on sight word recognition with this pumpkin sight words printable activity from The Connet Connection on Teachers Pay Teachers. This free download lets kids practice their sight words while they hunt for a black cat.

Help kids learn to spell their names with this apple printable activity from Books and Giggles. Kids can find each of the letters in their name on apples, put them together to spell their name, then count the number of letters in their name.

Twisty Noodle has a fall words printable coloring page where kids can trace the letters for fall words: acorn, leaf, apple and pumpkin.

Little printable books are so fun for early readers to read and color. I See Fall is a free printable book from Fun a Day that includes six fall items: acorns, sunflowers, pumpkins, leaves, scarecrows and apples. You have the option of printing it will all the words on each page (I see pumpkins, for example) or with the word see missing so kids can practice writing it in on their own.

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