Let’s be honest. Long car rides with children can be… taxing. Tiring. Tedious. Sure, the destination makes it all worth it. But by hour three of, “mo—oom, I’m bored! I’m hungry! How much longer?” even the grownups begin to feel cranky.
I’ll be the first to admit, sometimes screens are the answer! On longer rides, my husband and I will break up the trip by popping a movie on a tablet and letting the kids watch that start to finish. It passes the time. It feels like a treat. Everyone gets about 85 min of peace. But, like every modern parent, I fear the specter of too much screen time. So I’ve come up with some analog car games that help pass the time, use our imaginations, and even get a few giggles going. Here are some family favorites:
Rainbow Cars
Set a goal for the car to find one car for every color of the rainbow. Keep your eyes peeled on both sides of the road. Scan parking lots and car dealerships. See if you can find one of each color. When you finish, start again!
Want to make it easier? Don’t require rainbow order. Want to make it harder? Require that you cannot move on to the next color until the current one has been found.
This game keeps everyone chatting, can lead to lively debates about things like “does a gold car count for yellow?” and turns on the observational part of everyone’s brain. It’s an easy thing to passively play while you have other conversations. And I find that just when the game starts to lull, the sudden appearance of a green truck or a purple jeep can get the whole car excited again.
Car Faces
This one can be played any time, but is particularly great for dusk/early evening. I use it as a way to keep my kids from taking the dreaded on the way home car nap that will make them stay up three hours past their bed time once we pull in the driveway.
Check out the tail lights and bumpers of cars ahead of you and imagine it as a face. Evaluate the “eyes” and “mouth” and decide together, what feeling is that car face making? My kids get really into this one and even sometimes come up with a story about what would happen to make the car pull that type of face.
Scavenger Hunt Tally
There are endless possibilities of scavenger hunts to be had. Here are some we’ve tried:
Rainbow
You can play a modified version of rainbow cars by trying to inventory how many of each color you pass on the course of your ride. I made a simple chart with colors down the left side of the paper and made tallies for each car of every color we saw along the way. At the end, we counted up how much we saw of each color. This is a great one to play while you’re stuck in traffic and the cars on the other side of the highway are moving past you. It gives the kids a mission that helps pass the time of your car’s standstill.
Objects
Make a list of objects you might see on the side of the road or types of vehicles you might pass along the way. Tell the kids the list at the start and challenge everyone to keep an eye out for the things on your list.
I tracked this by grabbing five vehicle stickers from our craft bin and using them to make a simple chart. For the whole duration of our drive, my kids would interrupt themselves mid-sentence to joyfully call out finding an excavator or a police car to tally on our list.
State License Plates
This game is better for older kids. Invite them to keep an eye on license plates that go by and tally how many they see from other states. Skip Massachusetts because you would run out of paper quickly! But otherwise, have fun seeing the farthest away state you can find, searching for the coolest looking license plate, or seeing what the most frequently viewed state is.
Name Letters
Write your child’s name down the left side of a piece of paper. Give them a clip board and a pen and invite them to see how many times they can spy each letter on signs, trucks, and license plates.
Tip: If your child is sensitive to motion sickness, do not hand them a clipboard! This is the case in my family. So in our car, whichever parent isn’t driving does all the tallying.
Guessing Games
True confessions: I find “I spy” to be sinfully boring. So, we’ve come up with a few other games that involve guessing but provide some variety:
Animal Guessing Game
Each passenger takes turns listing off facts they know about a particular animal and try to get the others in the car to guess which animal they’re thinking of. Encourage the kids to make it tricky. Example: For dog “It’s a carnivore and a mammal and it lives in a house” before going straight to “It says woof.”
Any Kind of Guessing Game
Our family does animals because my kids are very into knowing animal facts. But this game can easily be modified to whichever topic your kids have garnered encyclopedic knowledge about: trucks, video games, Pokémon, trains, Minecraft. We’ve even used the game to hype the kids up about family they were on the way to visit by turning the game in to guessing about cousins and aunties. Sky’s the limit!
I hope this list helps you and your family ramp up the fun and ratchet down the frustrations for your car trips. If you have even more games, share them in the comments!
Happy trails to all!
