– Puzzles. Simple with few pieces, but still complex enough to be a bit of a challenge to your little one. We love these ones from the Dollar Tree. Foam, soft, easy to hold, they fit together any way and come in lots of characters my boys love.
– Dry erase boards. We love these for lots of things. We practice letters, numbers and shapes on them. We play hangman and tic tac toe. We write notes to each other and we draw pictures. We have two boards, one for each boy.
-I Spy Sticker Book. I took a small notebook and two sheets of identical stickers. I took one page and put the stickers randomly through out the book. Then I tucked the second page into the notebook. When Big J was ready to play, I handed him the book and the extra page of stickers. His task was to find the matching stickers and place them next to their matches. He loved it! He loves stickers and the search and find element was so fun. It took him longer to place the stickers, and that meant more quiet time for me.
– Magnetic Car Track. It was a travel version of the Kid’s Felt Track Set I posted about a couple weeks ago. Big J loves that set so much that I didn’t really want to be without it for two weeks… but it wasn’t a car activity. So I condensed the idea by cutting track pieces out of paper and used yellow puffy paints to put the lines on. I stuck magnets on the back of the road pieces. I also found small cars at the Dollar Tree and they are perfect for the track.
– I also printed out Pre-K and K pack pages for Big J to do. I shrunk them down to half pages and made them into a little book. Easy to keep everything all together, but easy to take one out and hand it into the back seat to Big J. I laminated all the pages and we used dry erase colored pencils on them. I loved not having to worry about melting crayons in the car (especially since it wasn’t my car!).
– We like to play “I spy with my little eye” while we drive. We did that a few times… a day. It’s interesting to look at the world through the eyes of a four-year-old.
– The tablet. Before you gasp and faint in horror, hear me out. Tablets are all about what games you let your kids play and the time limit. Of course, six hours of Angry Birds is probably not the best game plan… You can check out some of our favorite, educational apps in the Ten Android Apps for Kids and Ten More Android Apps for Kids posts. I am also a big fan of Spinlight Studios games. They have games for kids that encourage math, geography, spelling, counting, numbers, shapes and more all designed for kids from 3-10.
– Tangram Puzzles. I printed off tangram puzzle pieces and then laminated them. I got a few puzzle cards too to help my little guys get the idea. My little guys just played with the shapes and made their own pictures too.
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