road tripin'...

Took a trip with my husband’s family this past week; Sabine, Pascal, Camille, Emmanuelle & Laurent, Laurence, Anthony & Justine.

The idea was to go to Memphis to visit Elvises Graceland. Along the way we made many stops.

I had figured out our route and researched some cool stuff that we would or could be passing by from Roadside America. I had a large booklet of possibilities and created a smaller booklet from that for the children. This smaller booklet had things that they could possibly see from the highway while we were driving. I kept the larger booklet and if we decided to make some stops off the highway, I had a bunch of stuff we could occupy our time with.

Since the kids would be in the car for hours at a time, which is something that they are not used to being from France, I decided to make a few games. One game was the Alphabet game; I had only typed the letters A->Z and they were to find words on signs that began with the letters. They would start with A and then move on to the next letter once a word with A was found.

Another game was the license plate game. I found a website that had pictures of every license plate in the US. I put the pictures in a PowerPoint and as they saw the license plates, they would circle the corresponding license plate on the paper.

Finally the last game; Dead or Alive. I had pictures of several common animals that you would see while driving in a car – and now that I’m thinking about it, I should have had horse, cow, goat and sheep, but anyway I guess I was more focused on the "dead" - once they saw one of the animals, they were to put a tick mark and whether it was dead or alive. We have a lot of road kill – they probably have seen more wild animal’s dead in the US than they have seen living in France.