Car trip scavenger hunt

When I was younger vacation brought to mind words like “free” or “relaxing” or “not a care in the world” but now that I have two little boys, I have to say, my mind always jumps to the logistics first.

Don’t get me wrong, I always have a great time vacationing with my little ones – it’s great to see them experience things like the ocean or sand for the first time, but every Mother out there knows that unless you live close to an ocean, there’s either a plane trip or a car trip involved. And with travel comes great responsibility… as a Mom.

This year we’re going on a 13-hour drive to the beach and my husband thought it would be fun to do a car scavenger hunt with our five-year-old. Me being a huge fan of scrapbooks, I figured we could take it one step further. I created a scrapbook with pictures and words that our son could check off as he saw them on our vacation! It was super easy, and below is my little how-to!

1. Make up a list of things for the kids to find, depending on age. Since my son is five, we did things like ‘green truck’ and ‘sign with the number 20’ ‘police man,’ etc. For an older child, of course, you could make the list harder!

2. Buy a spiral notebook. There are a few options for the actual book- you could upload pictures to an online company and have them print a book, which can be a little costly but cute, or you could make your own book with scrapbook paper and bind it. I went for pre-made with the idea to print my hunt, glue it to scrapbook paper to make it cute, then glue it to the notebook pages. This just seemed easier to me!

3. Design the scavenger hunt pages. I happen to be pretty familiar with Microsoft’s Publisher program, so I snagged a few pictures from the internet and created my own little check boxes. But, it would be just as easy to use stickers or cut out magazine stickers to get the same desired list with pictures! Since my notebook was a 5x7, I designed the hunt pages to be a little smaller than that and printed!

4. Cut out all of the hunt pages with straight scissors, then cut out decorative scrapbook paper a little larger with decorative scissors.

5. Glue the hunt page to the scrapbook paper. Then glue the scrapbook paper to the notebook.

6. Voila!

I chose to do an introduction page, with my son’s name, then an instructions page on the inside that he could read, just to get him excited about the hunt. We talked about offering a prize if he finishes the book and finds all of the things, but we decided that wasn’t the point. We just thought it would be fun for a kid to try to find everything and we plan on playing along, getting excited when he finds something, etc. After all, who doesn’t’ love a good scavenger hunt?

Aleshia Howe is a Senior Communications Specialist for Texas Health Resources and Mom to two boys.