Published
The Best Ways to Keep Kids Entertained in the Car
Great Christmas gift ideas too!
Even before we started this full-time travel adventure we did a lot of traveling. We drove from Pennsylvania all the way to Florida with 2 little kids under 3. We have also gone to North Carolina from Pennsylvania many years with various ages of kids.
Here are some of our favorite car must-haves for road trips!
Table of contents
- Coloring Books
- Stickers
- Hidden Pictures
- MadLibs
- Would You Rather Books
- Travel Bingo
- Writing Tablets
- Magnetic Play Sets & Reusable Stickers
- Magnetic Color and Number Maze & Drawing Board
- Memory Match
- State License Plate Game
- Electronics
- Music
- Organization
Coloring Books
Coloring books are a staple for keeping our kids occupied in the car. They come in all sorts of themes to match different kids’ personalities, like Frozen and Paw Patrol.
Plus, they give kids a creative outlet to express themselves, which can help pass the time when the scenery starts to look the same.
Don’t forget to pack colored pencils and crayons (and of course a pencil sharpener!).
Stickers
If coloring books were peanut butter, then stickers would be jelly. But in all seriousness, our kids love stickers. There is just something magical about pulling a stick off and placing it onto a scene.
The sticker books we like also come with coloring pages. (see that PB & J analogy was going somewhere 😅)
Another type of stickers our kids like are these mix-n-match face stickers. Our kids enjoy making zany faces and sharing them with each other.
And if that wasn’t enough stickers, we also really like these paint-by-sticker. Which, as you probably guessed, is like a color-by-number, but with stickers! These have entertained our kids and our friends’ kids (and maybe caused a fight or two).
Hidden Pictures
Our kids love the Highlights Hidden Picture puzzles.
They’re like a mini treasure hunt on paper, where kids get to search for hidden objects within a larger picture. It’s a great way to challenge their observation skills and keep them focused (and quiet!) for a bit.
Our boys like to work on them together. They’ll share the open book with one taking the right side and the other the left.
You can find books filled with these puzzles, or even download and print some before your trip. Plus, it feels pretty rewarding for kids when they finally spot that sneaky hidden object!
MadLibs
MadLibs are a (adjective) way to keep (noun) entertained in the car. Our whole family gets involved in shouting out random nouns/verbs/adjectives to fill in the blanks. The resulting stories can sometimes be quite hilarious. The kids like these Pokemon and Barbie that we picked up in Branson, MO
And as a sneaky bonus, it helps the kids exercise grammar, spelling, and writing skills! Homeschooling in the car 💪
It’s silly, it’s chaotic, and it’s totally worth it.
Would You Rather Books
“Would You Rather” books offer simple either or questions. Sometimes a little nutty and sometimes a little thought-provoking. But either way, the kids enjoy taking turns naming their answers.
Travel Bingo
As a kid, I remember two things about long car trips, my old monochrome Gameboy Pocket and a chunky set of travel bingo with large cubes set in a tray. The travel bingo games these days are much smaller and can easily fit in your glove box.
Travel bingo gets your kids interested in what’s going on outside of the car. Then they might actually see that cool thing you point out to them before it passes you by.
Just make sure you keep them away form your little kids. Our 2-year-old destroyed most of ours!
Writing Tablets
These LCD writing tablets are a fun way for the kids to write or draw while in the car. You don’t need to worry about getting markers on your seat or sharpening pencils. You can write on them with the included stylus or use a fingernail in a pinch.
When your kids are done, most have a button that will clear off their doodles so they can start again. Our kids like to use them to create stories, clearing them off for each scene that they create.
Magnetic Play Sets & Reusable Stickers
Magnetic play sets and reusable stickers are the same idea in different forms. Your kids will enjoy making their own scenes and playing with the characters in them.
You can get generic ones like a castle and a safari, or they sell branded ones like Frozen and Barbie.
If you get multiple of the same kind (magnetic or stickers) your kids can cross between them doubling the fun.
Magnetic Color and Number Maze & Drawing Board
This magnetic board is a nifty toy, especially for younger kids. On the one side, you can use a magnet to pick up little dots to arrange into a picture. It includes several different ideas that kids can follow along with.
On the other side, it has colored ice cream cones for sorting balls by color and number. A little more education for the road!
Memory Match
These aren’t the memory match cards you might be familiar with. Those would be a disaster in the car!
This memory match board is a travel edition of the familiar game. Kids can play together by opening flaps to see what’s behind them. It comes with different cards to slide into the board so it isn’t always the same game every time.
Although you might find your kids snapping the flaps just to make noise. (Ask me how I know 🙄)
State License Plate Game
Before we left on our road trip my mom gifted the kids these state license plate sticker books. They have been trying to get all 50 states. They’ll look for interesting license plates on the road and even in parking lots!
Just be aware that this particular one comes in a 12-pack. My mother was very surprised when it arrived. But it worked out so that each kid could get one and some of their cousins as well.
Electronics
DVD Players
As much as we don’t want to let the kids zone out to electronics in the car, sometimes a movie is a great way to break up the monotony of being in the car for HOURS.
DVDs might seem a little old school in our instant-on-demand-streaming-internet age, but they work great in the car. No worries about not having signal or giving the kids an expensive iPad. (There might be a large crack in our iPad screen…)
We have had good success with the Wonnie brand DVD players. They come in a pack of 2 players that can operate independently or together if you link them with the provided cord. You’ll want to charge them ahead of time, but if you forget, no worries, they also come with a car charger.
Here are some recommended movies from our kids:
- Eli (11) - Narnia Prince Caspian
- Emalyn (9) - Barbie in a Mermaid Tale 2
- Gideon (7) - Lion King 2: Simba’s Pride
- Arabelle (4) - Sofia the First
- Adeline (2) - Frozen
Tonies
Tonies are part audiobook, part music player, and part toy. Each Tonie is a figure that, when placed on the Tonie box, might play some songs or tell some stories (or both!).
There is a wide range of Tonies available for all types of kids. They have multiple different types of Disney characters, Cocomelon figures, and even some National Geographic ones.
The Toniebox itself is chargeable with the included cord. It will need to be connected to the internet to initially download the songs & stories associated with the figures that you place on it. But after downloading and charging it works great in the car!
We bought a third-party carrying case that makes transporting all the figures and the box together a breeze.
Here are some of our favorite tonies:
- Frozen II - Anna
- Wild Kratts - Chris
- The Very Hungry Caterpillar - The kids think the song is hilarious
We also have the Asha (Wish) Tonie, but don’t get too excited as it only has one of the songs from the movie. A bit disappointing as most of the Disney ones have multiple songs.
Tablets
Tablets can be a blessing and a curse. But we mitigate that as best we can with Amazon Kids Fire tablets. We’ve been using them for years now with the Amazon Kids+, which gives unlimited access to kid-appropriate apps.
You don’t have to pay for any of the apps through the Amazon Kids+ subscription. You do pay for the subscription itself. It is less with an annual subscription and even less with an Amazon Prime account.
Beyond just getting apps, you can also manage the tablets via the Amazon parent dashboard. This allows you to see what your kids have been up to and allows you to adjust any time limits on the devices. When not in the car we generally set the limits to only apps for 1 hour and turn off the web browser and videos.
We’ve had them for years so it’s been long enough that we’ve broken a few. Amazon has a great 2-year policy to get a replacement. We’ve done it twice now and it was a smooth process both times.
Be warned that the devices seem buggy and won’t always work as expected. Take that with a grain of salt as we do have older models. But the price compared to buying several iPads has been worth the frustrations.
The Fire tablets usually go on sale for Amazon’s Prime days and other holidays, so look for the best discount.
Nintendo Switch
The Nintendo Switch has been our gaming platform of choice since before
we started traveling full-time. The best feature has to be its portability. It
is handheld so the kids can game in the car, at home, or anywhere in between.
We ditched the bulky dock that comes with it and bought a small adapter that
allows us to still connect to a TV for some heated friendly games of Mario Party.
The Nintendo Switch also has a wide variety of family-friendly, fun games to play. Some of our favorite games include:
- Mario Kart 8 (also on the Nintendo eShop)
- Disney Dreamlight Valley (even my wife enjoys playing this one!)
- Pokemon Violet (also on the Nintendo eShop)
- Kirby and the Forgotten Land (also on the Nintendo eShop)
We also got a carrying case to hold the Switch and multiple games. It also has extra room for the adapter and extra controllers.
Music
If there is anything a good road trip can’t go without, it is a soundtrack!
We enjoy listening to music in the car. If you happen to pass us on the highway you’ll probably hear us belting out Disney songs. Most of the kids usually join in with us and only occasionally get embarrassed. 😂
While we do have some CDs that we use, like Trolls 2, VeggieTales, and The Greatest Showman, we mostly use free accounts on Pandora and Spotify
Organization
Now that you have all this stuff, where do you put it? Since our Nissan NV 3500 doesn’t have those back-of-the-seat pouches, we bought these multi-pocketed behind-the-seat organizers.
They work great for storing crayons, coloring books, and our DVD players. Most of the time they end up with garbage in them from the kids… We have a trash bag for that!
And speaking of coloring books, we bought these lap tables for the kids as well. They work as a mini table for coloring on.
But they also come in handy at mealtime. As much as you know it will make a mess in the car, sometimes it’s just easier to keep traveling. So these lap tables can help contain the mess. And since we knew we would be eating on our travels we picked up several sets of travel silverware that we keep stashed in our car.
