Party Through the USA

My family is getting ready to take our three special needs kids on their very first airplane trip.  I'm a bit overwhelmed and anxious about the journey, but I'm really excited that we can give them this experience.  Flying commercially comes with a big list of new rules and situations.  To help prepare my kids, I created this social story. Do you also have a special needs or sensory kid?  Check out this list of tools for your next trip!  Airplane Travel Survival Kit for Sensory Kids I found all these great airplane travel graphics from Educlips on Teachers Pay Teachers.   I am so happy that she offers her art in both color and black and white.  The creator made it super easy to make the social story with a matching coloring book. My goal with this social story was to cover all the major moments in airplane travel, while still keeping the context short and simple.  So hard!  The story talks about arriving at the airport, checking bags at the ticket counter, going through securit

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post talking about how we were planning a huge cross-country road trip this autumn ( learn how to plan a road trip here ).  Well... we started mapping out how that trip would look, and decided to fly instead!  We've NEVER flown with kids!  I immediately started freaking out, as my mind filled with thousands of questions.  How do I plan this sort of trip?  Road trips are like second nature to me, whereas an airplane trip is a whole different and new beast. As soon as we announced to our kids that we were flying instead, they naturally had a lot of questions.  The more questions we answered, the more anxious they became about all the details of the trip.  We have found the  "How Airports Work"  book (there's a sticker activity book also) to be very helpful for showing kids all the complicated pieces of airplane travel and what to expect.  The TSA YouTube channel has a lot of good content, too. On top of the general anxiety (which I'

  This summer, my family is planning our longest road trip ever!  We're driving coast to coast diagonally across the USA!  It's an enormous undertaking and got me thinking about how I actually plan out such a big road trip.  If everything goes as we've planned, we'll have roughly twelve days of driving (total for both ways), which means a lot of stops in hotels.  Maybe you're also contemplating a BIG road trip and are wondering about how to plan out the stops.  Here's what I do: 1- Map It Out First thing you need to do is to pick out your destination.  I'm guessing that you've already done that if you're planning a big road trip.  We're going to Orlando, FL from the Pacific Northwest, as you can see from the above map.  If you're uncertain where you want to go, I'm not sure I can help you. Once I have the destination, I plug the trip into Mapquest or Google Maps and start breaking the trip down into sections.  It helps to think about both

Roadschooling is the word "we" use for describing homeschooling that you do while you travel.  Road trips are a perfect opportunity to sneak in a bit of learning- map reading, budgeting, workbooks, sign reading, car millage, and so much more.  This blog post is focused on geography resources for helping kids learn about all the states. Printables  Road Trip USA Curriculum from Confessions of a Homeschooler When I first started thinking about ways we could learn US history and geography on our cross-country road trip, Road Trip USA came to mind.  I've been considering this curriculum for several years.  It covers history and geography in one unit.  Click on the colored text above to read more about it. 50 States Coloring Page from 1, 2, 3 Homeschool 4 Me I haven't decided if I want to use a full coloring book of the states or just pages for each state we'll be traveling through (roughly 12 if my map skills are correct).  The above website will allow you to print on

My family loves going on road trips (that's why I started this blog).  We've been on several as a family, but I also grew up with road trips being part of my family culture.  This list is all the things I've learned and like to use for our own vacations.  I'm sure you'll find many things you can use also!  Be sure to poke around my blog for even more ideas. 1- Play the Mystery Snack Game Every blog post about road trips is going to suggest food to bring for your kids, but I'm suggesting that you make snack time into game time!  When you play the Mystery Snack Game, you play "20 Questions" to guess the hidden snack food.  It just takes a bit of preparation time before your trip and a way to wrap the snacks to hide them.  Click on the colored text to get more details. Get the Details on the Mystery Snack Game 2- Pack Each Day Together in Packing Cubes We love using packing cubes to organize our road trips, day trips, swimming gear, camping stuff, and mo

Wow!  Guy!  I  haven't blogged in two years!  Yikes!  In fact, my blogs (I have 3) have been on the back burner basically since the Pandemic started.  We've still traveled as a family, but I've just felt no motivation to get them blogged.  I'm planning for roll out some new posts in the next few months as we get ready for our biggest road trip yet! A NOTE ABOUT FREE PRINTABLES: Google decided to completely mess up my blog this past fall by changing all the links to my printables and destroying all my hard work.  I couldn't gather the mental energy to fix them.  I'm sorry if you've come by this blog looking for all the fun travel printables I've made and got frustrated with the system.  I hope to work on them soon and clear up all the messes.  I also have some NEW printables nearly ready for publishing, so come back and visit to grab those! My kids love all things tiny!  Ever since they were pretty small, I have been making them small world play sets and

It's family vacation season!  We've already done several small road trips this year and have one larger one coming up soon.  I write often about our own vacations and how we organize and plan them, so I thought I'd do something different for this blog post.  I asked the moms with lots of kids from my large family Facebook group to weigh in with their top hacks for traveling.  Every word of this blog post is their own words (used with permission).  So, here are some great road trip tips from the expert moms! - - - - - - - - - - - - Jennie, mom of 6 "I buy a kit of various fidget type toys on Amazon.  There are stretchy things and pokey things and poppy things, just things to fiddle with.  I split them in half into brown paper lunch bags (one for there and one for back, and not see through so it's always a surprise).  Whenever someone just gets too restless, I pull out a random thing and it distracts them for a bit."   - - - - - - - - - - - - Chantal, mom of 5