17 Airplane & Hotel Busy Bags

We moved to Santiago, Chile! 

i.e. travelled a thousand miles all the way from India, 3 flights and over 30 hours! Which also meant barring furniture that we stored, and some useful stuff that we could take with us, we gave away almost everything we owned! including the few toys & art material! (I did carry 25 kilos of children’s books though!!) 

And I finally succumbed to busy bags! They’re basically ‘activity kits' stored in small zipped baggies (or boxes!) that can be pulled out of your handbag (or shelves!) and given to your kid to play with. They are light weighted, and small and the contents can be spread over teeny tiny tray tables. I made 17 of them! But eventually used only a few in the plane (as we slept a lot, and he watched Ice Age while I caught up with Hunger Games's Mocking Jay… which was all about rescuing the most boring character in the history of cinema, peeta). But these bags were useful in the first week in Santiago too! 

The only caveat for using these in airplanes is that small pieces tend to fall off the trays! *Not* fun trying to wriggle your way to retrieve a puzzle piece under someone’s chair! But it is def better than your child screaming with boredom! 

The only two things I purchased were these cool transparent pouch sized zipper bags (9"X6") & binder rings. 

Roll a Dice for Spanish Translation

He speaks English and Hindi. And 6 words of Español. So roll the dice and translate Inglés to Español! 

Pattern Cards + Colored Beads + Pipe Cleaners

String beads on craft pipe cleaners according to patterns on the cards.

Pattern Cards + Lego Bricks

Make towers according to patterns on the cards.

Playdoh + Colored Match Sticks + Pattern Cards (or not!)

Colored Match sticks can be arranged as per pattern with our without playdoh

Tactile Count & Clip

There are some wonderful count and clip printables available online, all you need are some clothes pegs handy. But I wanted him to count something tactile & over 20, so I glued coloured matchsticks, sequins, pom poms on colourful origami sheets and scribbled 5 possible answers on the right. He has to count em, and peg the correct answer. 

Counting Beads + Wooden Numbers

Selected beads are be lined up from the bunch of 25 of them for counting and the the weightless wooden numericals to be used to place as the correct answer. 

Felt + Paper Clips

Clip according to color. Figured this would be a fun bag since it was hilarious watching him try to solve this intricate puzzle the first time around!

Straws + Pipe Cleaners

Pushing pipe cleaners into straws all the way out of the other end is no child’s play!

Goldilocks + Blocks + Prepositions Card

Once I got him a Kinder Joy meant for girls, as the one meant for boys wasn’t available! (Gasp!!) But we kept the toy that came with the chocolate, i.e, this doll anyways, by calling her Goldilocks (I guess that's less girly than Rapunzel…whatever!) Using Goldilocks and two building blocks, he needs to enact the prepositions according to the card. “Between” means he puts Goldilocks between two blocks, “far” means he places her far from the block and so on. This is a derivation from Totschooling’s gross motor skills prepositions card, wherein he himself climbed up the table or ran around it to enact the prepositions! 

I Spy Bottles

Carrying a tiny bit of our sensory bin with us in tiny bottles! One bottle has blue rice and alphabets that he needs to look for alphabetically and the other has purple beans mixed with misc items such as spatula, hammer, sea horse, and he needs to find every item on the list.

Pattern Cards + Velcro Craft Sticks

The sticks can be stuck together to form shapes….or a really long snake

Highlighter + Paper; Color Pencils + Paper; Crayons + Paper

An essential kit for the artist in him! These are busy boxes, not bags, made after we both painted some old puzzle boxes with acrylic paint.

Stickers drawing prompts + Paper + Crayons

I'd posted earlier about using stickers as drawing prompts, so I took plenty of them! Vehicles, clothes, sports related, many interesting options! 

Punch + Paper + Cool Pens

This never gets old! Cannot take scissors in an airplane but can prob whisk in a punch or two! Punch and collect in an envelope.

Jigsaw Puzzles

He is obsessed with puzzles, So one fine day I went ahead and purchased a whole heap! a few 24-30 piece ones (that he currently does) and even a few 60 piece ones that he will prob do a year from now! Frank puzzles are damn cheap, some $3 for a set of 3 so why not?! And noooo…I didn’t carry the boxes, in fact the boxes are just for show. The puzzle pieces from *all* these 6 boxes for instance fit into *one* single box. I tied a rubber band around each puzzle piece set to avoid mixing with other pieces.

(I love this little Disney Cars Baggie that can be zipped shut and put away! That’s how they should package puzzles! Whats with the damn boxes!) 

The boxes though did however come in handy to make a fort/ parking lot/ tunnel/ house…. 

Wipe Clean Activity Books

The *only* activity book that has worked for him is Peppa Pig’s Wipe Clean one. So thats what I’m taking. All other colouring books, pattern books, doodle books were given away cuz he just wasn’t interested! 

Books

I saw these terribly cute little read-aloud books published by Euro Kids, they’re tiny! and light weight! perfect for travels! 

17 Airplane & Hotel Busy Bags 

 Color-by-Word  |  Punch-by-Number  |  Peg-by-Picture 

Until later! Stay in touch!

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