20 Great Road Trip Activities and Printables for Kids
Sustainability has become an important concept in our society. Now most Americans at a young age are taught to “reduce, reuse, and recycle.” With this in mind, we can make significant headway toward preserving our planet.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re traveling with grade-schoolers, tweens, or older kids, and you don’t have to rely on iPads and audiobooks. Combine a few everyday items with a little ingenuity into your packing list, and you can provide your family with their own fun games and travel activities.
And if you’ve got a car- or truck-obsessed kid, you can stock up on these fun, printable road trip games and activities to keep them entertained on your next road trip.
Road Trip Activities for 3- to 5-Year-Olds
Different activities work better for different kids and age groups. For preschoolers in the 3-5 age range, arts and crafts will tap into their creativity and help them learn motor skills.
Music can be fun, too. How many rounds of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” have you sung during a road trip?
And pre-K and kindergarten kids are doing more academic learning these days, like sounding out words, counting, and simple math, so you’ve got more options than ever.
1. Magnets and Cookie Sheet
A cookie sheet is an easy DIY magnetic backdrop for numbers, shapes, and letters. Your kids can arrange them any way they want, and they’ll stay put!
Give kids simple math, spelling, or counting challenges. Ask them to see what kind of geometric patterns they can make — or just free them up to get creative and have fun with the magnets on their own.
2. Vehicle Matching Game
A road trip is a perfect occasion for kids to see lots of vehicles and learn what they’re called. With the free printable for this vehicle matching game, kids draw lines from each word to the picture of the vehicle that matches it.
Your little one stays entertained while they learn to recognize and name the vehicles they might see on the road.
3. Sticker Books
Sticker books allow young kids to be part of the story. Even if they’re not old enough to write yet, they can use the stickers to help them tap into their creative side. Stickers that can be used and reused are a special bonus, expanding the hours of fun on any family vacation.
4. Counting Cars
Our Counting Cars printables are a great way to teach your kids counting skills and naming the various kinds of vehicles they’ll see on a long car ride. Each page holds several cards, with each card showing a traceable numeral and a picture of that many trucks, cars, buses, or other vehicles.
By tracing the numeral on each card, your kids get to practice writing numbers and counting. And afterward, they can use them as flashcards or playing cards, with different suits: 4 of Cars, 6 of Trucks, 9 of Fire Engines, and so forth.
5. Felt Boards
Children can use a portable felt board to tell stories with pieces of felt, or learn how to arrange different sizes, colors and shapes in creative ways.
The soft pieces have the advantage of not having any rough edges. And felt sticks together, so the pieces hold to the board easily during playtime, then can be collected in a neat and handy storage bag when the play is done.
6. Trace the Truck
Tracing can be the first step toward the skill of free drawing. The movement lays a foundation for the fine motor skills involved in drawing and handwriting. Learning to copy from simple outlines helps children develop an eye toward establishing their own creative approach later.
And here’s a bonus: Once your child has traced the drawings, they can use the designs as coloring book pages to keep the fun going!
7. Magnetic Jigsaw Puzzles
You can create magnetic jigsaw puzzles by sticking an adhesive magnetic dot to the back of puzzle pieces. Then they’ll stick to a cookie sheet, and your kids can move them around at will. They can put puzzles together in the car without worrying about them getting jostled around by bumps in the road or losing pieces.
8. Vehicle Vacation Maze
Here’s a great way to introduce younger children to the concept of maps: The vehicle vacation maze is a winding road that passes alongside landmarks like buildings, lakes, and trees. They can encounter road construction zones, stop signs, and other typical road trip sights, too.
Your kids can draw their way down the road on the paper to guide their vehicle to its vacation spot. Simultaneously, they’ll see how charting a course goes along with an actual journey, and how both can be a lot of fun.
Besides navigating the simple maze (and learning how different choices can result in progress or dead ends and backtracking), kids can learn to distinguish between different sights along the way. Hotels, gas stations, restaurants, storefronts, and homes become familiar both on the map and in real life when they appear on the roadside.
9. Velcro Popsicle Sticks
All kids love popsicles, but you can use the sticks for more than just eating. Wash them off (or just buy them fresh at a dollar store!) and attach Velcro to them so your kids can attach them and create different shapes. You can store your Velcro popsicle sticks in a zipper bag or box to keep them together.
10. Auto Alphabet
What letter of the alphabet does the word “car” begin with? How about “airplane” or “helicopter”? The Auto Alphabet game can help teach your children about word meanings, letters, and sounds. Each card contains a picture of a vehicle, the word for that vehicle, and the letter that begins the word.
Your children can trace the letters on each card, which can help not only their fine motor skills but also their memory and word association. Kids will learn that A is for ambulance, B is for bus, C is for car, D is for dirt bike, etc. It’s fun to see a vehicle for every letter in the alphabet!
11. Wikki Sticks
You may not have heard of Wikki Stix, but they can be a great road trip activity for kids. These are made of brightly colored yarn attached to a flexible stick with a touch of nontoxic wax.
It’s a simple combination that allows children to create shapes from flowers to butterflies to animals! They’re perfectly safe and infinitely changeable, which makes them great for unleashing children’s creativity and imaginations.
Road Trip Activities for 6-10-Year-Olds
Kids who are a little older will need activities a little more advanced and involved to keep them engaged. Imagination in this age group is tempered by the beginnings of logical thinking and questioning, and developing a greater ability to think of things in sequence.
They’re also learning greater problem-solving skills, so the games and activities you pick for school-age kids should be appropriate for their increased skill levels, focus, and attention span. Here are some travel tips and road trip ideas for them.
12. Lacing Cards
Our printable Lacing Cards allow kids to practice craft and motor skills — cutting, threading a needle, and sewing. They embellish different images with yarn by lacing it through the front and back of the card using the guide dots placed along the edges of the pattern.
Parents will need to help prepare this activity, which requires glue, scissors, and a large plastic needle to thread the yarn. It might be a good idea to have mom or dad sit in the back seat to help (or, even better, prepare this activity before the trip, at a rest stop, or during an overnight stay).
Parents can glue the printable to a file folder or thick cardstock paper. Kids can cut out the shapes with safety scissors. With some help, kids can thread the plastic needle with yarn and poke it through the cardstock, lacing the yarn around the edges of the truck and bulldozer.
13. Mad Libs
Mad Libs is one of those classic travel games that’s a longtime tradition on road trips. There are no moving pieces. All you need is the book, a pencil, and two or more people to play. They’re a great way to teach parts of speech and encourage creative thinking.
In a Mad Lib book, one person reads the “story” and prompts the others to fill in the blanks with a type of word — noun, verb, adjective, or adverb — without knowing what the words around them say. The resulting story gets crazy once the words are all filled in, and the bizarre sentences leave everyone in the car laughing.
14. Road Trip Bingo
On the road, kids can see a lot of things, if they look closely enough — cars and trucks, of course, but also cows, horses, buildings, trees, fire trucks, signs, highway cones, etc.
Another longtime favorite among road trip games, Road Trip Bingo can keep kids occupied with the scenery for long stretches. Our printable adapts it to be played from the car seat.
It’s like a road trip scavenger hunt: Kids call out the things they see and circle each one on their card. When they get five in a row, they can yell BINGO!
15. Coloring Books
You’re probably familiar with coloring books from school classrooms, where students use crayons to color inside the lines. Cars can get hot, though, especially during summer (when most families take their vacations). You don’t want crayons to melt in the car — especially if they’re left there by mistake — so colored pencils are the better alternative.
Coloring is another way to encourage creativity, as well as the fine motor precision necessary to stay inside the lines. But precision isn’t necessary on a family road trip, just as long as your kids are engaged and having fun.
16. Paper Bag Puppets
A car trip is more fun when you invite an imaginary friend along. And would you rather just imagine one — or make one come to life? Paper bags can be transformed into all kinds of puppets, from kangaroos to mice, from lions to owls.
Get creative with construction paper cutouts and glue sticks (again, parents might need to help). A long road trip can fly by when you’re in good company.
Road Trip Activities for 11-13-Year-Olds
Children ages 11-13 can tackle more complex logical problems and hypothetical situations. Older kids are more capable of engaging in abstract thinking and scientific exercises, which are introduced in school around this time.
Here are some car games, fun things to do, and road trip tips for this older age group.
17. I Spy Road Signs
I Spy Road Signs is a variation on Road Trip Bingo, with more specific objects to look out for. Begin by downloading our printable covered with pictures of various road signs. Each time your child spots a new kind of sign, they can circle it or draw a checkmark next to it.
Older kids can spice it up by competing to be the first person to spot a certain kind of sign, or to spot the most of a certain sign. At the end of the trip, they can count up the number of circles or checks to tally how many signs they spied.
18. Maps and Atlases
Most kids in this age group already know how to use an electronic map via the GPS on their phones, so you can keep them engaged by designating them to navigate a fairly straightforward leg of the trip. Kids get a sense of control when they know where they’re headed, not to mention a sense of importance and responsibility for being chosen as navigator.
But the inclusion of paper maps or atlases on your trip can add another aspect to the fun. There’s an art to recognizing symbols and reading a paper map. So before you leave, print out a blank map of the area where you’ll be traveling … or just use an old paper map from the glove compartment.
Mark out your planned trip route so your kids can follow along, letting them mark off each landmark (towns, rivers, national parks) as you pass. They can draw each landmark and decorate the map however they want. After the road trip is finished, they can bring home a memento of their trip to look back on. It’s like having a travel journal in map form.
19. Road Trip Word Search
A word search is a great language game for this age group. Tie it in with your trip by using the words for things you might see on a road trip. Kids circle the names of different kinds of vehicles, roadside sights, and structures they encounter along the way, such as bridges and toll booths. It helps with observation, focus, and spelling skills.
20. License Plates From all 50 States
The license plate game is another road trip favorite. In this version, you can make it even more fun by starting with this printable map of all 50 states. Whenever kids spot a license plate from a new state, they color in on the map the state that represents it. At the end of the trip, they can total up all the states they’ve “collected.”
If you want to extend the fun, laminate a few copies of the printable map and give everyone in the car dry-erase markers to use. When the trip is over, the ink can be wiped away, and the maps can be reused on your next trip.
In addition to games, don’t forget goodies and road trip snacks, and maybe create a playlist of your kids’ favorite songs or podcasts. There’s a lot you can do to make the best road trip ever for your kids — and a learning experience, too. By tailoring activities to their interests and age levels, you can make each vacation an adventure: not just when you get to your destination, but as you head out on the road and return, too.