Keeping Toddlers Happy and Occupied While Traveling by Road
If your toddler is anything like mine, I am sure that you would enjoy reading this post. My daughter loves to be entertained and kept occupied during car rides. That, I think, is her fee for sitting in the car seat and being happy about it. Anyway, here I am sharing some of our favorite toddler activities for car rides and road trips, both long and short.
Hand and Finger Games
I’ve found that toddler activities which involve hands and finger movements tend to keep toddlers occupied for quite some time before they get tired or bored. Pat-a-cake, This Little Piggy and Round and Round the Garden are some of our favorite hand and finger games.
Sing-a-long Rhymes
Since my daughter has started talking a bit, she loves to do nursery rhymes that she can participate in. So, we sing nursery rhymes that she knows fairly well or play CDs and sing along to them. Since, we have been doing rhymes for quite a long time now, she knows pretty much all of them and can sing along quite well.
I Spy
This is another fun toddler activity for road trips since there are a lot of things to be “spied”. This toddler activity, I’ve found, also helps to build vocabulary, increase recognition and reinforce learning from books. However, I keep it simple and fun so that my daughter can actually guess what I’m spying. For instance, we see a cow on the road (yes, here we do!). So, I go, “I spy from the corner of my eye, a big and white animal” It doesn’t rhyme but it does the trick. She looks around and spots the cow, which she’s seen earlier in books and points to it. If she remembers, she says, “Cow-cow”, else she just points excitedly.
Counting Games
This again is one of those toddler activities that encourage learning and comprehension. We’ll play count the birds or the trees or again, the cows. This toddler activity has taught her numbers with relative ease and because it is fun and interesting, she doesn’t mind playing “Count This” quite a few times.
Road trips and car rides can be fun with toddlers. Do read my earlier post – On a Road Trip with a Toddler for more tips on car journeys with a toddler in tow. So, how do you keep your toddler busy on a car ride? What are your favorite toddler activities for a road trip? As ever, please do share.
Pic. courtesy: Mel B.http://www.flickr.com/photos/42dreams/1458978111/
I also love to play word games, for example naming all animals my daughter knows. If you then imitate the sounds each animal makes, that's even more fun. Or we take my daughters favorite CD with and then "dance" in the seat. Playing with little puppets that do funny things or tickle her also works very well.