Road Trip Books & My Survival Secret

We were a little rusty packing for this most recent road trip, but I managed to occupy my 6yo (not reading independently) and my 8yo.

My top survival secret for road trips: a schedule! At home we follow a “rhythm” (an order or flow to the day). It’s not surprising then, that for road trips, we’ve found a list of what to expect has put to rest the “I’m bored” and “I don’t know what to do” refrains. I let everyone know the schedule as we start our trip, and they are always happy to hear what I’ve got in store. I use a loose rotation of:

• listen to music all together
• quietly do something independent (color by number/read/mazes)
• listen to an audiobook or podcast all together
• play something together (road sign bingo/Funny Fill-Ins (Mad Libs)/Brain Quest)
• snack/calming music

For this particular trip, here’s how that looked. You’ll notice that several items have specific times built into them (the length of the CD, snack at a particular time). Otherwise, I “read the room” a bit!

I also print out a map of our route and place it into a wipeable sleeve for the kids to trace our progress. Yay for map skills practice 🙂

Seek and Find/Puzzle Books:

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If you’re curious about what books my non-reader (and my reader, too!) enjoyed- lots of seek & find books! You can find a great list of those in my post Books That Travel Well. 

Activity Books

I keep the quiet reading time separate from these types of activities. My kids are welcome to choose from a variety of ideas, but they’re a separate choice list than quiet reading time (see the books above for my pre-reader. The older boy was reading The Falcon of Eric the Red).

There are lots of these NG Kids Funny-Fill-In books. We chose this one because we were traveling to a national park, but there are also themed books about an amusement park, safari, ocean, dinosaurs, and lots more.

When my kids were smaller, they loved the Melissa & Doug Water Wow books.

We listen to tons of audiobooks all year round. Here’s our list of favorite family read alouds. For this trip we listened to Starry River of the Sky by Grace Lin.

You may also enjoy my previous road trip posts from when my kids were smaller:

Happy Trails!