Are We There Yet???

By Nancy Blakey

Successful travelling with young children largely depends upon three things: healthy snacks (we all know a hungry child is a cranky one), plenty of stops to stretch little legs if you are travelling by car or walks down the aisle of an airplane, and diversions to engage hands and minds for making time pass quickly. The following activities will help with the diversion part of your journey. The projects fit into a cake pan with a lid. The cake pan not only holds the materials needed for the projects, but also serves as a lap desk when turned upside down (with the lid securely in place).

Before the trip, have your child help put the materials for the projects into the cake pan. Include plain paper, felt tips and/or crayons, and scissors. Another fun item to add are pipe cleaners.  Briefly explain what the projects are about, and let the anticipation build.  Keep an open mind — one of my sons, who considers himself an inventor, ignored all directions and materials for the projects and used his cake pan for his own ideas of creative fun.  Bon Voyage!

Magnet Maze
Kids of all ages enjoy this activity. Younger children will find tracing a squiggly line with their paper clip challenging enough, while the older ones love trying their hand at designing a maze (astonishingly difficult!). 

What you will need:

• small strong magnet (the best can be found in the hardware store)
• white paper plate
• paper clip or small metal washer
Optional: different items to discover which are attracted to a magnet such as a penny, a nail, a bean, etc. Place in a zipper type sandwich bag.

It’s simple. Have your child draw a maze or line on the paper plate with a felt tip pen. Place the magnet under the plate and a paper clip on top, then pull the paper clip along the line (or maze) with the magnet. You can pretend the clip is a fish trying to find food, or create a story with your child as the magnet travels across the page. You may also want to expand this activity with a Magnetic Poetry Kit for Kids (words on magnetic strips), available at many bookstores. The word magnets will stick to the cake pan bottom.


Mile Marker Bags
These bags are a fun way to concretely mark the time to arrival. If you are travelling by airplane, you can use time increments instead of miles.

What you will need:

• zipper type plastic bags
• permanent marker
• treats or treasures to put inside: stickers, gum, comic book, deck of cards, box of raisins, jelly beans, dice, coins, fish weights or lures without hooks, small action figures, chocolate kisses or coins, etc.

Decide what increments you will use on your bags  (one hour, or 50 miles for example). Use the permanent marker to write ‘To be opened at 50 miles’ (or 1 hour) on the first bag, then on the next bag write ‘To be opened at 100 miles’ (2 hours), and so on until you have covered the mileage or time of your trip. You may want to increase or decrease the increments according to the age of your child and the length of the trip. 


Colour Magic
This project is full of hidden science! The pieces of coloured plastic allow children to play informally with primary colours and discover for themselves the combinations that make up the hues of their world.

What you will need:

• clear plastic report covers in red, blue, and yellow (available at office supply stores or wherever school supplies are sold)
• typing paper
• tape
• orange felt tip pen

Cut the report covers into squares about the size of your child’s hand. 

Ask your child to combine and overlap the pieces to come up with the colour green, purple, or orange for example. For more fun demonstrate some magic with a secret message card.  Write a message or draw a picture on a piece of white typing paper with the orange felt tip. When the image is covered with the red piece of plastic, it disappears because our eyes are not sensitive enough to distinguish the orange light coming through the red plastic. We can only perceive the red. Perhaps another kind of animal with sharper eyes would be able to read the message we humans cannot! 

Invent a game with the secret message project above, pulling the red plastic aside and allowing the orange letter to show with a correct letter guess until the word or message is decoded. 


Make Time for Memories
Technically this is not a project. It is a reminder that we rarely find the time to sit with our child and teach the gentle arts — how to tie a shoe, blow a bubble, or tell time (pack an old alarm clock, take it apart when you return home.) Travel time with your children can provide a relaxing climate to learn in. Hours together in a car are also a wonderful time to tell old stories from our own childhoods. My children grow instantly alert with the words ‘When I was a girl. . .’ I tell them the indignities I suffered, the adventures I had, bullies I escaped, and the tree forts I built. It is hard to imagine a parent as a kid, but it provides a link with the past, and a connection to our children in a very real way.