Are we there yet?

As summer quickly approaches, family vacations are being planned. The thought of driving for hours in a car with small children can bring a little anxiety to some parents. The key to a stress-free road trip with children is all in the planning.

A road trip with children can actually prove to be a wonderful opportunity for learning. The following are some ideas to keep your children entertained during a road trip without spending a lot of money.

Call out a color and have the children look for something outside that is that color. You can also call out a shape and have children look for objects that match that shape. You can also have a list of items for children to look for such as a red car, a brown cow, etc.

Children can also practice counting aloud by 2s, 5s, and 10s.

Brush up on some classic children's songs and have a sing-along with your children. There are a lot of really good CDs out there with children's music you can play in your car to sing with your children.

Magna Doodles and Etch-a-Sketch are great portable games to pack for a road trip. You can also pack small dry erase boards for children to practice writing letters, numbers, or create pictures.

Cookie sheets make wonderful magnetic boards and the Dollar Store sells packages of magnetic letters that children can use to practice spelling out words and their names on the cookie sheet.

You can also purchase brightly colored pipe cleaners at the Dollar Store and children can use their imagination to create animals, chains, letters, shapes, etc.
If you are feeling creative, you can paint or draw a raceway on the inside of a shoebox before the trip and your children can play with their Matchbox cars in the shoebox.

Older children can have a spelling bee as you say words for them to spell for you.

You can give them a map of the United States and as they see license plates from a particular state, they can color in that state on their map.

Older children also love to play card games such as Old Maid, Crazy Eights, or Go Fish, which can be purchased at Wal-Mart or Target.

Disposable cameras can be purchased inexpensively at Wal-Mart (Fuji brand works great!) and it is a fantastic way for your child to capture moments of their trip.

A travel journal is another way for your child to have a keepsake of their vacation. A simple sketch pad with crayons or markers is all your child needs. Each page can have a sentence or two about their vacation with an illustration they create. If your children are too young to write a sentence, have them dictate to you what they want to say as you write it for them. Your children can then draw the picture.

In researching ideas for this article, I went to Barnes and Noble Booksellers. In the children's section, in addition to all the wonderful reading books, they offer a lot of riddle, joke, and tongue twister books for children. In the activity section, there are many mazes, dot-to-dot, sticker, and learn to draw books. All of these books have themes children love, such as pirates, trucks, dogs, space, bugs, and even Disney princesses.

I hope these ideas will help everyone have a fun-filled, stress-free road trip this summer!

Anna Martinez is the director of Cornerstone Preschool. She can be reached at 782-1995.