5 Language Games For Your Holiday Road Trips

With many of us heading out on the roads for holiday fun in the coming weeks, here are five car-friendly language game ideas to try out when you start to hear “are we there yet?” from the back seat!

Category Naming Game

This game is fantastic not only for challenging your children’s phonological awareness skills (in this instance, identifying beginning sounds) but also for practicing categories and identifying how items are grouped together.

At the beginning of the game, choose three categories (eg. things Santa might bring, things that are cold, things that are red). Then for each round, choose a sound that items must begin with (eg. if your sound is “s”, your answers might be slime, snowman, Santa’s suit).

For younger children, try generating the answers yourself and giving them clues (eg. For something red, I’m thinking of something that someone who says “Ho ho ho” might wear). When they guess correctly, reinforce both that it begins with a “s” and that it is red!

The Story That Never Ends

Silly is the name of the game for this one! Take turns adding either a word or a whole sentence to a story and see where it goes. Play around with a mix of dialogue (funny voices encouraged!), descriptive language (eg. the elf walked through the big, bright workshop) and experiment with verbs you might not use everyday (eg. Santa scoured the house looking for his lost cookie).

I Spy

An oldie, but a goodie! Older kids will enjoy working on their phonological awareness skills (those beginning sounds again!) to find objects beginning with a target sound (eg. I spy with my little eye something beginning with “m”), while the younger kids may want to take turns finding things that match a description (eg I spy with my little eye something that is purple).

Rhyme Time

This is a great one for practicing the phonological awareness skill rhyming!  To play, choose a word (eg. cat) and take turns generating words that have the same ending sounds (eg. Mat, bat).

To support younger kids to play this game, either give them descriptive clues (eg I’m thinking of an animal that flies around at night) or get them to identify whether your words rhyme. This second strategy will require that you sometimes make mistakes (eg. Hmmm I think truck rhymes. Did I get it right?). Accentuate your ending sounds when using this second strategy to help them to hear whether the endings are the same or different.

I’m going to Grandma’s

This is a great one not only for helping kids to generate objects by function (in this case, things that might be useful at grandma’s house), but also for developing working memory and listening skills.

To play, start by saying “I’m going to grandma’s and I’m bringing a... “. Next, you’ll generate something you might bring to Grandma’s house (eg. a present). The next person will then repeat the sentence, including what you’re bringing, plus they add their own item (eg. “I’m going to grandma’s house and I’m bringing a present and some cookies”). The game continues like this until someone can no longer remember the complete list.

For this game, you can also play around with different locations (eg. What would you bring to the beach? To go skiing?).

Happy playing everyone! Wishing everyone a happy and safe holiday season!