Wonderful World Travel Activities for Kids (Without Leaving Home!)
Broaden young minds with these fun world travel activities for kids. Travel the world without leaving home with these easy and inexpensive ideas to entertain children. Not only will your kids have a great time, but also they will gain knowledge about other countries and cultures.
I recently had the pleasure of spending a few days with the youngest members of our What a Good Day team. I decided that I would pick a country to “visit” each day. As part of the visit, we had food, crafts, and worksheets tailored to each country. Read on for inspiration on how to create the perfect trip that will help children discover more about the world. Here are some examples from our trips to France, Norway, Italy, Mexico, Egypt, and the United Kingdom.
Taking Off for Your World Visit
Set the stage for your international travels and have your fliers pretend to board the airplane. To make it more fun, here’s a link from Kindergarten Expert to print out free boarding passes that you can hand out to your tiny travelers. To keep it simple, use your sofa as the plane. You can serve a snack and have them watch a short video for their inflight entertainment.
World Travel Themed Food for Kids
Pictured above are a couple of examples of themed food I made for countries we visited. Pinterest has tons of ideas for country themed food that kids will love. For our trip to France, a fruit Eiffel Tower and a croissant made the perfect snack. While visiting Norway, a Viking helmet made from frozen waffles and fruit was a great choice to serve for breakfast. Other kid-friendly food ideas are quesadillas for Mexico, pizza for Italy, and mummy dogs for Egypt. To create mummy dogs, simply wrap strips of canned crescent roll dough around hot dogs and bake.
World Travel Themed Crafts for Kids
Crafts are a great tie in to the country you are visiting. We made 3D Eiffel Towers and Egyptian pyramids which were both big hits with the kids. Other favorite crafts were mini pinatas and royal crowns.
To make the 3D Eiffel Tower and Egyptian pyramids, a quick search on Pinterest turned up templates that I printed out on cardstock. Here are the links I used for the Eiffel Tower (from Raise Curious Kids) and the pyramid (from StudentHandouts.com) templates. Both of these were free.
To make the mini pinatas, here is the link from Scattered Thoughts of a Crafty Mom that gives easy to follow instructions. You can find templates of more elaborate crowns online. I kept it simple and cut strips of cardstock to fit each child’s head (taping strips of cardstock together as necessary). Next I cut out triangles along one side of the cardstock strips to resemble a crown. The kids then had fun coloring their own designs.
Fun World Travel Worksheets for Kids
For each country we visited, I found online lots of free mazes, country flag coloring sheets, and other themed worksheets to fit our theme for the day. Muse Printables is a great source of international themed mazes. I found mazes in the shapes of the various countries. I also found mazes in the shapes of tacos and sombreros for our Mexico day.
Another fun worksheet/craft was this kangaroo outline from Sugar Spice and Glitter. We used the Aboriginal dot painting technique which is super easy for kids. All you need are cotton swabs and paint.
Additional Ideas and Resources for Having a World Travel Day at Home
As I mentioned earlier, Pinterest is a tremendous resource for ideas and inspiration for all aspects of creating a world travel day at home with your kids. Check out our Pinterest board World Travel Activities for Kids for more food, crafts, and worksheet ideas you can use.
Other things you can do include learning a few words in the language of the destination, dressing up in clothes, or listening to music from the country you are visiting.
All of these ideas are a great way to have fun with kids and expand their knowledge without spending a ton of money. It’s important for them to know that there are lots of different cultures in the world. A world travel day is also a good way to engage kids’ imagination. When I was asked “are we really going to France today?”, I replied “of course we are…in our imaginations!”.
Bon voyage,
Kristin
Note: Content of this post is from Kristin @whatagoodday.com. All images and content are copyright protected. Please do not use my images without prior permission. I’m happy for you to share this post but be sure to link to this post. Thank you.
Looking for more fun ways to connect with kids? Check out these posts from our blog!
Got Bored Kids? Ten Easy Ways to Tell a Story That Will Delight Any Child!
It’s a Terrific Day for a Teddy Bear Picnic!
5 Simple Ways to Add Adventure and Excitement to Your Kids’ Lives!
One Comment