Thursday, January 08, 2015

Busy bags for road trips

When we decided to take a road trip with our 3-yr old this December, I started to look around for ways to keep her busy on the road. In our previous trip earlier this year, she played a lot with stickers and I was skeptical if she would play with just stickers for long. That's when I came across  the concept of "busy bag". Basically it is just a small bag containing a re-usable activity that can be done independently. I found tons of ideas here and I put together quite a few for our recent trip like -

1. drawing book and crayons
2. paper and scissors
3. beads and pipecleaners
4. decorate your ice cream sticks / any design with stickers
5. Make your tree with crepe paper and cotton.
I also used some of the activity kits that come with our monthly subscription of Little Readers' Nook. 


Some of our busy-bags

One of the activity my daughter did on the way



This was the first time I made something like this and it was a big hit with my daughter (and us).  I made about 12 bags and split those into 2 sets of 6 each - one for onward journey and one for return. With all the bags placed in her back-pack, she could pull out one and entertain herself and us too. Since all activities were in separate bags, every bag was a surprise and we played guessing game to see if she could identify whats in the bag by touching it before pulling it out. It was also easier to clean up when she was done with one activity. Added plus was that I didn't have to spend huge time to put them all together and can surely be reused & replenished when required.

The busy bags were a huge relief for us as we didn't have to entertain her all the time and the journey was almost screen-free (only 40 mins of screen time in 16-hr journey !).

We loved these. Hope you like it too.



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