Spring Break Travel Activities for Kids and Family
At this point in the season, we are dreaming of the end of winter and love to start planning Spring Break art activities for kids just to get ourselves warm. Cameron has tried on every bathing suit she owns. Twice. And Kane has his suitcase at the ready. So the kids were super excited to try out a few new travel activities from OOLY!
For the past few years, we've taken a warm-weather spring break trip with a group of several families. It's a lot of fun. And A LOT of kids, so I always bring a few different art projects and activities to have at the ready for when the kids inevitably need a break from the beach. I've tried a range of projects over the years and I'm sharing a few of my favorites with you today:
Travel Watercolor Set
Our kids love to paint, but traveling with any kind of quality paint can be difficult. Thank goodness OOLY's new
Chroma Blends Travel Watercolor Palette packs a sophisticated punch of color. The kit comes with genius, refillable water brushes and a great mixing palette too. One brush has a flat tip the other has a round tip which really lends themselves to all kinds of watercolor techniques and I was totally impressed with the color quality.
I'm sure it helped that we used
OOLY's Watercolor Paper too. The pad is sturdy for travel, but I also like to cut smaller pieces of paper when we travel. It changes things up a bit for the kids and I find they never sit long enough to fill an entire piece of paper, so this also avoids waste. I can totally see this activity working from the plane to the pool.
Reading Activities
Yes, we read on vacation. And sometimes the kids even read without anyone making them! In fact, our first year traveling together, on a particularly long drive, the kids spontaneously began passing around and sharing a book with each other. Each kiddo took a turn reading a chapter aloud. It was super cute. Now that the kids are a little older, I thought it might be fun to do some kind of travel book club.
I haven't figured out all the details yet, but I know that fun supplies go a long way toward making reading activities fun for the kids. I love
Notes on a Roll Sticky Note Set for marking passages, writing questions, or commenting on something that catches your eye. It has a tape-like dispenser so you can choose any note size you like plus they have colorful & fun patterns. And guess what-they are peel-able, they will peel off most surfaces including paper! The kids thought these were awesome too! And the
Double Up! mini markers are the perfect travel size for annotating and they are in a handy travel case. I am an active reader and love to mark up my books, so I just might nab the
Neon Click Scented Retractable Highlighters for myself (they smell good and there's no cap to fall underneath the plane seat in front of you!).
Journaling
One of my favorite memories of family travel growing up are the journals and sketchbooks my mom would bring for us. I still have several featuring my 7-year-old pencil sketches of the views from our family cabin and poems about inane items like mothballs. So I always make sure to tuck a few in when I pack for our own family travel. Our kids use
these mini journals for all kinds of things—from sketching what they see out the window to dear diary moments. And OOLY's
Unmistakeables Erasable Colored Pencils will certainly help cut down on the "Oh no, I ruined it!" moments.
Now if spring break would hurry up and get here!
Rebecca Green
Author of
Banish Boredom
Content Creator and Herder of Cats at
Not-So-SAHM
