game to play with your kids on long car trips
Looking back at my childhood, I remember taking road trips with my family (this is well before there were DVDs, let alone CDs or other entertainment systems in cars) and we had to find ways to pass the time as the corn stalks and rolling hills rushed past the windows. Reading books in the car never worked for me as it would as I had car sickness, but we would play games about books.
My mom, dad, sister, and I would each take turns going around the car naming book titles, but the last letter of the title had to be the first letter for the next person. “Fox in Socks” would then queue “Sneetches”. Since that one started and ended with an “S”, the order reversed. It was a great game to help pass the time, but after a while, we would end up always going through the same 30 books or so. So we needed a way to expand and get into more titles (since there is rarely a word that ends in “I” so I was never able to play my favorite book, “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie”.)
My sister suggested that instead of using the ending letter to start the new title, and since we were working on the orders of our alphabet, she suggested that we take however many letters are in the last word, and add it to the last letter and that becomes the starting letter. For instance; “Where the Wild Things Are” the last letter is “E” and there are three letters in “Are”, so from “E” you go three letters forward to get “H” and that is the next starting letter. This method really helped expand the game, and we could keep it going for hours and almost never repeating a title.
Now that I have children of my own, and take them on road trips, my wife and I have picked up these same past-time games. It really encourages them to read more, learn more titles, and has improved their overall reading abilities. I have seen their vocabulary grow just by them picking up a new book once a week. For every new book they pick up, there will undoubtedly be a new word in there that my kiddos will read, absorb, and use in conversation. But their knowledge of titles continues to grow.
