Fun Activity Box: Entertain your Preschoolers for Hours!
I love our fun activity box, well, actually we have two of them, one for when we travel with the kids and one for when I need to occupy them say at Church or another event where they have to sit quietly for a few hours. Depending on how you use the box and how creative you get, the entertainment can last for hours! To make the box last longer, only pull one activity out at a time. If you don’t need to worry about stretching the fun out, try combining toys – see how many crayons they can stuff into an deflated balloon. Great entertainment! Hope they help make your times out and about with kiddos a little bit easier.
Items we have in our Travel Box to Help Entertain your Child:
- Stickers
- Magnifying glass
- Pipe Cleaners
- Wipeable Crayons
- Balloons
- I Spy Jar
- Silly Putty or Goop
- Band-aids & Rubbing alcohol pads
- Mini-Mirror
- Laser pointer or small flashlight
- Feathers
- Noise Makers
- Lollipops
- Small toy figurines or cars
- Folded Aluminum Foil
- Mini-whiteboard
- Disposable Camera
- Light colored markers
- Scissors – Magazine pages to cut up
- Sticky Sticks
- Finger puppets
Use your imagination! There are tons of other things you can include in your “Fun Box” – Is there something I missed? Be sure to tell me in the comments!!!
Activities to Keep Kids Busy:
- Play I-Spy with the jar, see if you can find the fireman's hat or the can of soda, etc.
- Pretend to be a Dr. with alcohol pad & bandaids.
- Use the alcohol pads to clean things (arm rest, window, etc.).
- Make animals with the bandaids (ex: butterflies, snakes, shapes like triangles, squares, etc.)
- Use the pipe cleaners to form letters, shapes, measure things, make pretend mustaches, poke each other, have a sword fight, etc.
- Go on a bug hunt. Close your eyes, one person hide the bug within site (ex: back of chair, behind your arm), have the other person find the bug. Have bug conversations.
- Create a home for your bug out of napkins/cups (provided by airline during snack time).
- Use the foil as a mirror, make faces at yourself. Try to discover textures by wrapping foil around them (ex: hand, bottom of shoe, edge of seat). Make foil into various shapes, letters, etc.
- Silly Putty, stretch it, make it into a ball, fold it and hear it snap, copy writing in pencil, imprint textures, make a ring to wear, etc.
- Play with goop. Make shapes of letters, make thumbprints, pretend to cook, etc.
- Play with feathers, tickle yourself, tickle your friend, watch them float.
Going on a trip with kids? We have ideas to help!
This is a neat idea,I think it would be a cool idea to slip the goodies in a pencil bag and put them in the seat pocket in front of the child. Happy trails!!
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Great list of activities. We also add in books, and tag readers. Tag readers are great for hours of fun.
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What an awesome idea! I am going to add a link to this to my Great Posts blog entry on Saturday.
I LOVE these ideas and plan to use them when we travel in 2 weeks. What are sticky sticks?
What are sticky sticks? They are great! So versatile, they are basically yarn soaked in wax, making them into a moldable craft resource that is mess-free (once made). I made my own – and its pretty labor intensive. Here is the post I wrote about how to make them. You can also buy them from Wikki Stix
Great ideas for the travel box, I am going to have to add pipe cleaners and finger puppets to our own travel box but no noise makers, they do enough of that on they’re own! 🙂
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I had to make do with my imagination when I was a youngster 😛
I like this Fun Activity Box this wrap is part of fun activity ..This is great idea..Thank you!!:D
Before portable DVD players, on long trips we would play the license plate alphabet game, where you work through the alphabet based on the letters you see on the license plates of the cars around you.
Of course now with portable DVD players, a couple of movies really passes the time away.
Well that’s plenty of stuffs. We use to bring our mini telescope for my little kid. And because she loves to sing along, she always brings her ipod with her.
Those are nice ideas on how to entertain your kids. I think is a very useful article, and it is good to allow children to be creative. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks,
Brandy
The most important stuff for my kids that has to be in their activity box everywhere we go is camera because they love taking photos a lot.
Any suggestions for a 16 month old travel box? She’ll get into anything anywhere if you let her when we travel–and I can’t blame her–she’s curious!! Help! 🙂
I find the best travel box items for kids are small electronic games, such as Yahtzee and Battleship. Puzzle games like Rubik’s cube are good too. Also, an inexpensive Mp3 player with their favorite songs has proved popular as well. However, the *very* best item ever invented for traveling with kids are portable DVD players with a long battery life. Regarding the items on your list, I would replace the disposable camera with an inexpensive (perhaps used) digital camera and rechargeable batteries. I would also nix the noisemakers!
Love the ideas! So glad to have found you! I would add an empty coffee/oatmeal/etc can covered in scrapbook paper or contact paper (to collect all the goodies found along the way!
Love it – totally reminded me of the bag/carton I put together for our cross-country flight recently. http://jennifischer.blogspot.com/2012/05/planes-trains-automobiles-busy-bags.html – It worked perfectly!
I always enjoyed making halloween costumes with the kids. Looking forward to that time of year again soon!
This is great; i am looking for an activity that I will conduct for my students. I am a high school teacher; I love to conduct activities for the kids so that they will not be bored.
This is neat! We made one for a vacation and just a tip- If you can’t find a mini white board- The white board markers and crayons will work in most board books. I got a few out of the $$ bin at walmart and our toddlers actually preferred writing in the board books to the plain white board. Wipes right off!