For families with young children: Tips for Spring Break

Whether you’re packing for a road trip or a plane trip or staying home for Spring Break, parents in the area are planning kid-friendly activities.

Mia Tischer, executive director of LearningRx Chicago-Naperville recommends a number of activities and toys to keep kids busy.

To keep the “Are we there yet” questions at bay, Tischer recommends planning for long car trips and plane flights.

“Spring Break should be a fun, relaxing time, but why not pick toys and activities that build cognitive skills,” she said.  Here are some she recommends:

• Uno - Logic and reasoning, working memory, attention

•  Legos - Executing processing

•  Spot-it - Visual processing, processing speed/attention, speech and language development

•  Simon - Visual processing, processing speed/attention, short-term memory 

•  Tangoes, License Plate Games- Visual processing/logic and reasoning

•  Blokus, Battleship, Checkers, Chess - Logic and reasoning

 •  Memory Match and Fish -Card games for visual processing, memory

For her family, she has some travel size games for the car.

“More importantly is just taking time out from your busy spring to just BE with your kids.” She recommends putting away your devices and reading to children for 20+ minutes or ask them to read to you.

“The key to this is spending quality time. As moms/parents we want family vacations to be memorable, great life experiences and happy. Sometimes it good to breath, relax and enjoy them too!”

She also encourages a family challenge: Putting away with electronics for the week. “You’ll discover other, much better ways to have fun and bond together as a family.”

Other activities she recommends are:

1) Keep a vacation scrapbook. Even pre-readers can create one by drawing pictures of sites and events. Pack instant cameras, paper, markers and crayons, glue sticks and tape.

2) Handheld games are a great way to keep kids occupied while you're driving, but a Frisbee or soccer ball works wonders during stops along the way.

3) Before the trip, take your child with you to pick out kid-friendly magazines, like American Girl or Legos to read on the trip.

4) Hit up the dollar store. If your children are very young, an expensive new toy can yield big dividends. Parcel out a new toy for them to unwrap each day.

5) Stop and smell the roses. Unplanned stops make a day's drive much more exciting and rewarding.

6) Let your kids have a say. Older kids can map out an entire day, selecting the driving route and planning all the stops and activities. Younger ones can pick out where to lunch or where to make pit stops. Or, they can adopt a theme for the ride, take turns suggesting a game or create a music playlist.