My young grandkids and I occasionally get to travel long distances together in the car. As I’ve already written, a DVD player is a wonderful thing for those long trips! For that matter, so are electronic games and a fun DS.  Even the younger crowd can play those. After a while, though, the littler grandkids start getting bored and that’s when I dig into my “grandma travel bag of car games” for some fun activities to keep us all too busy to notice how long the drive is.

The first games we usually play include a family favorite alphabet game with as many different sets of rules a we have people in the car. It can be as difficult as having to find items or signs outside the car that start with the next letter of the alphabet. For instance, Avenue would count for A, Blvd. for B, etc. Or we can go very simple by saying that as long as a sign has any letter that matches the alphabet letter we are on, it’s ok. In that case, Avenue would count for A, V, E, N, or U. We also have fun with Animal Alphabet, Random Rhyming, and Story-Go-Round.

Recently, I decided it was time to add some new games to my “grandma travel bag” and I had fun finding a few interesting new ones. We’re going to give them a whirl on our next long trip. If you beat us to it, we’d love to hear how you liked them:

First I discovered some cute printable car games for kids at Nick, Jr. Dora and Diego’s Car Bingo games are not only fun for the grandkids to play, it helps them (and grandma) learn some words in another language! Hmmm, after we’ve played with these a few times, we could make up our own, and even vary the languages. We could have German, which I took in high school, and French which their mom’s took in high school. Very fun!

I loved the educational games I found at About.com’s homeschooling site. They’re great for all kids, including those involved in homeschooling programs and those in brick and mortar schools. My two favorites were Odd or Even which even my youngest grandkids can probably play, along with License Plates – adding (or for that matter subtracting, multiplying and/or dividing) the numbers on the license plates. How fun!

One more, from A to Z’s Cool Homeschooling Site, included several interesting and educational travel games. My two favorites here were Semi Search (withOUT the Air Horns game ) and Trivia. That one is similar to the alphabet game. Someone selects a letter, then everyone spends the next ten minutes looking for as many things as possible that start with that letter (or that sound).

With all these fun new car games, I’m really looking forward to our next long trip. How about you? Do you have some fun car games not mentioned here. We’d love to hear about them. 

This is part of the Family Friday event sponsored by HomeEverAfter, where you can find even more fun ideas and interesting info that is great for grandparents as well as parents.