10 Best free busy bags for long haul flights

We've done multiple long haul flights (24+ hours) with our kids at various ages between 11mths and 9 years. Here are 10 of our favourite busy bags for the 1-3 years ages group, made using things from around the house:

1. Beach balls. Hands down BEST toys we've ever taken on a plane. We took two and and used them A LOT at the stop overs in Hong Kong airport. We had so many random kids join in or look longing at our family playing with them. Great for all ages 2 to 42!

2. Things in a bottle. First version was paper beads made from junk mail in a bottle. This was definitely the  favourite for our 13 month old. Second version was pipe cleaners in a spice bottle, which was more interesting for my 3 year old.

3. Letter writing. This is my 3 year old's favourite busy bag, plane or no plane. We made a bunch of tiny envelopes and packed them in a zip lock bag with some pens, stickers, little notebook and stamps. Hours of fun writing "letters" to all his favourite people. (note: Christmas cards can be a good source of little envelopes)

Free printable tiny envelope - just for you!

4.  Small bag of figurines. We used old trashies that the kids had mostly grown out of. They acted out all sorts of adventures in the plane seat.

5. Fishing game. Made with soy sauce fish with an old screw glued in the neck and a magnet.

6. Buttons and a toy ute (pick up truck) and digger. A little bag with a collection of old buttons, and matchbox size cars was a big hit. We include a pair of eyebrow tweezers for non-airport travel, making it great for fine motor control play!

7. Small box with loom bands and hook and different coloured box sections. Sort the loom bands by colour. Even better if you can find someone to take turns with!

8. Threading. Pipe cleaners and melty beads in different colours. Match the beads to the pip cleaners.

9. Books. Any little book that your child might like. We particularly like tiny Pixi books and Thomas and Friends.

10. Apps! Our favourites include Mini Sago, Dr Panda and Lego Duplo apps.

Wooden Parking Garage

 

When my son was younger he was cars obsessed, anything with wheels was much loved. We started with a cardboard garage when he was 1. We gave him a commercial plastic garage when he turned 2, but it just didn't last even though he's a fairly gentle child.

Eventually I decided it wouldn't be too much work to make a wooden, more robust version. Unfortunately it's so long ago now, I don't have any plans etc to share. Only the pictures of a much loved and well used wooden garage.

Hand Print Canvas

This hand print canvas is one of my favourite wall hangings. It is done with kids poster paint on a white canvas. The kids needed some paper to first learn how to put their hand down and take it straight off without smearing, and let's face it, once the paints are out and the hands are dirty it seems a waste to stop the fun after only 2 little hand prints.

Perhaps a good father's day gift idea for those in the northern hemisphere? It's also fairly light and easy to post to distant relatives.

Sidewalk Chalk

Some more great times with sidewalk chalk. Both my kids have done their first great drawings and writing with the fat chalk sticks. Probably because it requires less fine motor control, and more fresh air. 

Our all-time favourite is a chalk road for bikes, trikes or scooters. I draw out a road, about a foot wide, with some intersections. If I'm feeling enthusiastic I'll add dotted lines down the middle of the road, traffic lights, (personalised) parking bays or a petrol station. If the kids are feeling in a drawing mood they'll add arrows, houses, pedestrian crossing, sweet shops. Once my son even drew a grocery shop, and then when he was writing the sign for it he asked me how to spell "very boring things shop". Sometimes we've drawn letters along the side of the road so they can sing the alphabet song while they're riding.


Sidewalk chalk is also good for life size portraits or hopscotch, or (a favourite of all the neighbourhood kids, but not so much of me) grinding the chalk up to make "fairy-dust". Although the fairy-dust game keeps the kids busy and industrious, and fairy dust is then good for making hand prints and foot prints on the concrete, it's also good for making hundreds of chalky footprints through the house!

I think the best thing about the sidewalk chalk roads and artwork is that they last until the next rain, and then you have a clean canvas to start you new creation.

Coffee Table Road

This is one we've done quite a lot of over the years, especially when Mr 4 was heavily into cars. Just cover the coffee table with a large sheet of paper, draw a road on there and let the play begin. As the play progresses the kids usually ask for some other things, like a school or park or more traffic lights, but they also really enjoy adding their own drawings to it. We've even sometimes drawn train tracks for the wooden trains, with stations etc. Depending on the age of your child it can also be good to have different coloured car parks for different coloured cars.

Simple Plane or Car Games

Here's a list of games I've collected (with our upcoming long-haul flight in mind), which are suitable for preschoolers in a plane or car or even in a tent on a rainy day. They should need nothing more than your body, or pens and paper (and the occasional piece of sticky tape).

Travel Games for Kids:

1. Odds and evens (pick odd or even, then stick out 1 or 2 fingers like scissors paper rock, count your fingers and your friends fingers to see if the total is odd or even).

2. Find 3 things starting with the letter…

3. I spy.

4. Thumb wrestling.

5. Stretch and wriggle. Find all the body parts you can wiggle.

6. Randomly select two body parts and try and touch those two body parts together. (Maybe make a spinning wheel with lots of body part names, or write lots of body parts down and close you eyes and pick, or get two people to choose one part each).

7. Try and guess who I am.

8. Write the alphabet, fill in an animal starting with each letter.

9. Write the alphabet, fill in a food starting with each letter.

10. Write the alphabet and find something you can see starting with each letter.

11. Draw a picture of things you might expect to see at your destination.

12. Draw a picture of a zoo.

13. Draw an outline of one or two people and then fill them in.

14. Draw an outline of a scene and then fill the picture in: a beach, the sea, a campsite, a garden, space etc.

15. Paper bag mystery. Put something in the spew bag and you have to try and guess what it is.

16. Guess the letter. One person closes their eyes, and the other draws a letter on their palm or back or foot. Could also be done with numbers or shapes.

17. Guess how many seats. Count them.

18. Hangman.

19. Naughts and crosses.

20. Close the square.

21. Make finger puppets.

22. Make a finger puppet movie.

23. Make paper clothes for a doll.

24. Make a puzzle (with square pieces).

25. Travel memory. Look at a plate of objects for 1 minute, then take the objects away and try and draw as many of them as you can.

26. Mr squiggle. Draw a few squiggles on a page and the other person has to turn it into a picture.

27. Make a scavenger hunt from a magazine.

28. Find something of every colour of the rainbow.

29. Find something in the shape of a circle, square, triangle, oval, rectangle, trapezoid, arch.

30. Tell a fairy tale from your head: 3 bears, Gingerbread man, 3 billy goats gruff,etc.

31. Tell a book from your head: any bedtime story you've told enough times to roughly remember by heart.

32. Make paper houses.

33. Make a mobile phone or robot out of empty fruit juice or dried fruit boxes. 

Mom's Mini Van and this site have heaps more travel game ideas.


Do you have any other good travel games?

Butterfly Craft

I saw this being done at the local museum a while back, and adults and kids of all ages were all really enjoying it.

Draw (or trace) an outline of half a butterfly, with a dashed fold line down the centre.

Fold the paper down the fold line, and cut around the butterfly outline

Punch a hole in the centre of the fold line

Cut shapes from coloured paper and glue them on to decorate your butterfly. You could also use pens, paint, glitter, stickers, etc.

Take a chenille stick and twist it to give a finger-sized hole

Thread the legs of the chenille stick through the hole in the centre of the butterfly. The finger loop should be on the plain side of the butterfly.

At the head end of the butterfly, fold the chenille stick over the edge of the paper

Top side

Bottom side

Ready to fly!

Cut and Paste People

Never underestimate the appeal of cutting up a piece of paper and sticking it on other piece of paper.

On this occasion we cut parts of people out of an advertising flier and Miss 3 stuck them together on a plain piece of paper.

Plane Activity Tray

We are planning on taking the kids on a long trip later this year. It will involve almost 60 hours of planes and airports, 6+ hours of trains, and a wedding reception, amongst other things. I'm not terribly worried (although a little more worried now that I add it all up and write it down in black and white) as I'm sure I can plug the kids into various electronics for most of that... but where's the challenge in that?

So I have been trawling the Internet looking for activities and ideas that can make the trip more enjoyable.

One thing that I saw and really liked the look of was an activity tray. I also liked the look of this table cover. I am still plotting a way to combine the two, but first I wanted to have my own attempt at an activity tray.

My guidelines were something slimline that could potentially fold behind the tray on multiple different types of aircraft, and yet a tray that was as big as possible. Preferably something big enough to fit the food tray on, so no knives and forks would be making a dash for the floor.

This is what I came up with:

Plane activity tray, Mark I.

I took the dimension of the aeroplane tray table to be roughly 24cm x 42cm.
 

I chose sides for the tray to be 3cm on the back and sides, but I wanted a lower front (2cm), so the kids wouldn't have to hold their hands so high to reach things. 

I took an old drop mat and cut it to size leaving 1cm around the edge to sew (so I cut a rectangle of 32cm by 50cm). I then took pieces of old laminated paper and cut them into 4 pieces; 2 to fit the sides (24cm x 3cm), and 2 to fit the back (21cm x 3cm). The back was made from two pieces, not one, as I wanted to leave a gap in the middle of the back so that the tray could be folded smaller than an a4 page, and easily fit into a backpack. I made sure the laminate pieces were a fraction on the small size so that they wouldn't interfere with any folding lines. I then folded the edge of the drop mat over (1cm) and sewed the laminated paper in place.
 

For the front edge I glued a fine strip of batting along and folded the edge over and sewed it into place. Again I left a gap in the batting in the middle of the front edge for easy folding. This made the tray more comfortable to lean wrists on and yet stiff enough to provide an edge. I am worried however that it also makes it too bulky to fit behind a closed tray.

Plane activity tray, folded in half ready to carry

The corners were the tricky bit. I had originally planned to use velcro, but the velcro I had was such poor quality, and the size of the corners was so small, it just didn't grip well enough. So (thanks to some inspiration from Mr Crafty) I decided to sew a loop of ribbon a little way from the corner, which the folded corner can be neatly tucked under. In the next prototype I think I'd use elastic instead of ribbon to made it even easier. To make the front corner a little easier I prefolded the top corner down and stitched it in place.
 

Front corner, folded

Back corner, folded

Front corner, unfolded

Back corner, unfolded

We then trialled the finished product at the dinner table, as a drawing tray and also as a bead threading tray. It worked well, although it didn't managed to catch strings of beads that were dropped half a meter away from it...

Edit: I made a second one with some improvements. Find it here.

Playing with Ice

This is a great activity for a warm sunny day. First we filled a couple of muffin trays with water. We put food colouring in the water, mixing up a slightly different colour for each hole (although the colours were difficult to see against the dark muffin tray, it did make them prettier in the water). We then collected a variety of small things from flowers and leaves to plastic toys, old shells and coins, and dropped one in each hole.

And then for the most difficult part of this activity: waiting for it all to freeze.

Once the ice was frozen, we filled a tub with water, put the ice cubes in and watched them melt. It was interesting for the kids to see what would float and what would sink, and they though it was very exciting to watch the ice melt and see what melted first and see the treasures re-appear. But above all, they just enjoyed getting their hands wet and cold.

They enjoyed this activity so much we immediately made a few more batches, and we even made a couple of bowls of ice to take to kindy for their water play table.

Rainbow Taggy Toys

I have a bit of a soft spot for rainbows, and so when Becced posted this picture of a rainbow lion taggie at about the same time as we were expecting three new babies from friends and family, I just couldn't resist having a go myself.

They were very quick and easy, simply a matter of sewing on a little face (I used fleece and a little bit of embroidery so I wouldn't have to hem anything), pin around lots of ribbons, and then sew it together. I added some bells in the middle of the stuffing to give them an extra jingle. For more detailed instructions, here's a great tutorial.

The hardest thing was getting a photo of them without Miss 2 cuddling them.

A Busy Roll

I had been eyeing off some beautiful busy books, but I wanted to try something that I could make in one morning, and was more easy to post to a friend or fit in a handbag.

This was the result. A busy roll. There are two pockets at the bottom, one velcro shut, one snap shut. A lacing activity with felt and a ribbon and button, a zip (which leads to no-where, much to the kids disappointment.) and some pony beads on a string maze.

The loops were a bit small on the string maze to start with, but the kids thought it looked appealing, and especially loved the pockets and the lacing.