As some of you may remember from a few weeks ago, we took an amazing RV trip at the end of the summer, the week before school started. When making plans for what I wanted to take with us (which included a lot of books, of course, as well as some sticker-by-number and sticker-by-letter activity books and open-ended art supplies), I remembered that my friend Theresa from the Literacy in Motion account on Instagram created wonderful travel-themed active learning journal pages for her little ones when they traveled this summer. I took some of her ideas and managed to create a few unique pages of my own, and you all were incredibly eager to see these pages up close!
So, keep reading to see what I came up with for the girls. But before we dive into that, let me tell you how we approached completing these pages, which was with complete freedom and flexibility for the girls. Yes, I put together 15-20 pages of activities for each girl (we were going to be traveling for a week), but I had no requirement that they finish all of their pages, or that they even do any of them. They were simply there for moments of boredom while we were driving around, or for moments of relaxation by the campfire. Our younger daughter completed most of her pages, whereas our older daughter only did 2 or 3.
And you know what? I was totally fine with that! I didn’t want these to feel like chores or to become battles of will, so I didn’t push these notebooks on them at all.
And the beauty of these pages? They took me about 10 minutes to put together, and all we needed to do the activities were the mini notebooks and something to write with. We had more than enough markers, pens, and pencils from the art supplies we packed, but you could complete all of these with just a pencil, if you need to pack light.
So what did our notebooks look like? See below for images and brief descriptions of some of the pages that I created for one or both of the girls’ notebooks.
1 — A number trail. Our junior kindergartener simply followed a number trail from 1-20, counting by 1st, while I created 2 skip-counting pages for our second grader (counting by 2s and 5s). 2 — Who’s Missing? Fill in the blank lower-case alphabet for JK. 3 — ABC Chains, similar to the number trail, for our JK child, in both capital and lowercase. 4 — Search and circle activities. The 2nd grader discriminated odd and even numbers and the JKer looked for vowels vs consonants.
(All the images immediately above were for our 4 year old entering Junior Kindergarten) 1 — Connect the numeral to the dotted image. Builds counting, subitizing, and recognizing numbers skills, as well as fine motor skills. 2 — Greater than/less than caterpillar. 3 — Tent Graph. Count colored tents and complete bar graph. 4 — S’mores Stacks. Building numeracy and counting by 1 (we adopted for 2nd grade by thinking 10 less and 10 more).
(All the images immediately above were for our 7 year old entering 2nd grade) 1 — Connect the doubles equation to the written numeral. 2 — Math Mazes. Working on adding strings of numbers up to 5, and adding 10. 3 — Dazzling Doubles. Building fluency with doubles. 4 — Tent Totals. Building fluency with number combinations equal to 10.
(All the images immediately above were for our 4 year old entering Junior Kindergarten). 1 and 2 — Using insects we might see while camping to practice proper letter formation. 3 — Visual Perception — Building hand-eye coordination, bilateral coordination, working memory, and fine motor skills.
(All the images immediately above were for our 7 year old entering 2nd grade). 1 — What Color is the Shovel? Working to recognize common color words. 2 — Bug Problems. Creatively thinking of math word problems and how to solve them.
One of the biggest hits was a travel word search that I copied almost letter for letter from Literacy in Motion (you can see it in the featured image above). If you’re not following her yet, be sure to check out her account, as she’s got incredibly inspiring content!
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