I remember many family trips when we played various games involving what we could see out the windows as we drove down the highways. I wrote a blog post describing several of these activities a few years ago. You can read that post here.

With all the advances in cell phone technology, where many kids have their own phones, perhaps we need to find ways to get them to use them to capture their surroundings, instead of missing the surroundings because they are texting or playing some game on them. Here is an activity to motivate your children to look around and use their cameras to capture what they are passing by…

If your children don’t have their own phones (good for you), perhaps you can supply them with one of your older phones that are no longer active for making calls or accessing the Internet, but will still take pictures. If you can provide each child with a cell phone camera, you can make a game of looking for different kinds of pictures as you travel. You can list anything on your scavenger hunt from the ordinary things you see everywhere, to landmarks unique to your trip. The idea is to have fun and keep the children looking out the windows to see what they are passing along the way.

Make up your lists before you start each round, or make up the rules as you go. Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Specific landmarks unique to your trip – extra points to the one who gets the picture first.
• Land forms – cliffs, mountains, mesas, buttes, rivers, creeks, lakes, meadows, woodlands, dams,
• Nature specimens – birds, butterflies, trees
• Farm animals, crops, and structures – horses, cows, chickens, goats, corn fields, barns, silos, windmills
• Items by color – each child must take pictures of things in their given color (one child looking for blue things another looking for red, etc.)
• Alphabet game – things that start with each letter of the alphabet taken in alphabetical order.
• Numbers – things seen in groups of 2, 3, or 4 (OK, that may be stretching it a bit, but try to think outside the box to get more ideas. Perhaps your kids will come up with the best ideas of things to look for.)
• Cloud pictures – they must tell what they see in the clouds.

Once you arrive at your destination you might try other twists to your scavenger hunt:

• Selfies with the photographer and items in the picture.
• Sound scavenger hunts – record the sounds of whatever makes noise – bird sounds, motorcycles, wind chimes… Let them see what they can find without limiting them to your list.
• Nature shots that can’t be taken from a moving car – insects, wild flowers, wildlife

Ground rules: This activity is designed to get your children looking out the windows and not at their cell phones. Cell phone games, texting, and other activities that keep the children looking at their phones instead of out the windows should cause them to lose their phones for a pre-determined period of time. You might designate a specific time when those activities will be allowed, but use a timer and limit it to a fraction of the time on the road instead of allowing it to become the dominating activity of the trip.

Safety wise: the driver does not play this game… sorry.