Make a Travel Activity Book In Under 10 Minutes

I used The Trip Clip with my kids a lot over the years, and there was a long period of time where we would never take a trip without two clipboards filled with activities the kids would like. On airplane trips they always wanted an Airport BINGO board for while we waited to board our plane. On road trips they spent hours over the years playing the License Plate Game, Count On It, doing mazes and crossword puzzles, and playing Battleship, Hangman, and Dots and Boxes together.

One of the things that made this toy so convenient is the Activity Book feature. This saved me many times because even when I was running late (and I so often was!), I could put together a clipboard that contained hours of entertainment for my kids in about 10 minutes.

How to Use the Activity Book Feature

This feature is most effective if you own all of the fun and educational activities. I recommend spending the additional $5 to get the kid-sized clipboard along with the fun & educational activities.
Once you have an account on the The Trip Clip website, go to the Activity Book on The Trip Clip’s Entertainment page.
Check or uncheck the boxes based on your kids’ interests. This is how I would have set it for my kids at ages 12 & 9:

Once you’ve made your selections, click Add To Queue, and The Trip Clip will automatically generate a complete workbook for you that you can print out. Each activity is on a half sheet of paper, so you’ll need to cut them all in half. I have a paper cutter which made this easy, but even with a pair of scissors you can zip through this cutting quickly, and there’s a guideline printed up the middle for you to follow. The selections up above would make 68 activities pages for my kids to use on our trip, all in less than 10 minutes!

Once you have 68 pages to manage, you can keep them organized by clipping them into The Trip Clip Clipboard. Sometimes I also stapled the packet together to be sure the loose pages didn’t float around the car. The clipboard made a nice writing surface for the kids and they could easily hand it back and forth when they were playing a game together. The attached 4-color pen never gets lost since it’s tied onto the clipboard (this is a design element prompted by my older son, who lost every pen or pencil I gave him within minutes of leaving the house with his clipboard until I found a way to tie it on!).

Here are my kids using The Trip Clip Bundle to play Dots and Boxes together as we head out on a road trip:

My kids especially liked to use The Trip Clip activities together. The two player games like Dots and Boxes, Hangman, and Battleship were favorites. They also worked together to find the items on Bingo Boards, or played the Slug Bug game against each other. Individually, they liked the mazes, crossword puzzles, and cryptogram puzzles.

On the same road trip pictured above, my older son had a good time playing the License Plate Game. We traveled through a lot of states on that trip and so we saw a bunch of license plates we hadn’t seen before. He marked off each license plate on his checklist and then shaded in the state on the map. I like to think this helped him understand the geography of the country a little better!

Here’s the map he created that trip:

Although my kids also spent plenty of time on their screens playing games and watching movies that trip, The Trip Clip helped pull them out of their screens occasionally, and even helped them engage more in our trip. Some of the activities I’ve included are specifically designed to get kids to pay attention to the world going by outside of the car. Whether they were looking for items on their BINGO boards, or license plates on the cars, or items on their Count On It boards, it kept them looking out the window and that often turned into chatting with us about what they saw as we drove. Playing games together while we drove also kept them off their screens and enjoying each other’s company for a while.

For just over $20, this is a great investment. We used it on every trip we took for many, many years. I hope your family likes it as much as mine did!