Road Trip Games for Kids

Road Trip Games for Kids fills 40 printable pages for the back seat. Most pages are played by looking out of the window and marking what you see, and the rest are pencil puzzles, drawing pages and a journal for each day of the drive. The printing guide suggests one copy per child.

Before the car leaves

Five pages get kids involved in the planning. There’s a pack-my-bag checklist of 20 things, a set of car rules signed by the driver, the navigator and the back seat crew, a destination fact file, a route map to draw with a star for every stop, and a snack plan with six slots, each with a day and the name of whoever picked it.

Games played out the window

• Two scavenger hunts. The easy one, for ages 4 to 7, has ten pictures to find, like a red car, a cow and a fluffy cloud. The challenge hunt, for ages 8 to 12, has fifteen harder finds, from a toll booth and solar panels to a church steeple.
• Two bingo cards. Road sign bingo is a five-by-five grid with a free square, and whoever fills the whole card picks the next snack stop. Billboard bingo is four in a row, and a full card wins control of the music.
• The license plate game. All 50 states are listed. One point for each new state, two if you’re first to call it out.
• Tally and spotting pages. The alphabet game, a color hunt, a truck tally, an animal spotter split into farm and wild, and a running count of cars, birds and houses.

Puzzles, paper games and stories

Two word searches, one with 12 words and a harder one with 16, some running backwards. There’s a travel crossword with the answers along the bottom, a maze, a ten-difference spot the difference, a best-of-six tic tac toe tournament, and two dots and boxes boards for two players. For talking games, there’s a page of ten would you rather pairs, a fill-in-the-blank story with twelve blanks to collect before anyone reads it, and eight story starters.

A journal for each day

Eight journal pages cover eight days on the road, each with the miles driven, the weather, the best thing you saw and a box to draw in. The trip review scores ten parts of the trip, from the snacks to the travel companions, and the last page is a thank-you note for the driver.

Printing for the car

The guide says every page works in black and white, with color nicest on the cover, the bingo cards and the scavenger hunts. Five pages (12, 13, 18, 19 and 29) are landscape, so leave the printer’s orientation on Auto and print at Actual size. The guide suggests cardstock around 65 lb for pages that ride in the car all week, a clipboard for each child, and colored pencils rather than markers. Print the journal pages one day at a time so they don’t all get filled in on day one.