Globalroamink’s Weblog

Kid Chat: Let the Imagination Travel. Part 1

It’s June, which means that kids across the country are anxiously awaiting the closing school bell. But June also means that family road trip season is just around the corner.

When I was growing up, my parents were avid fans of the family road trip. Once classes let out, my mom and dad piled me and my brother and our two dogs into the trusty family station wagon and set off for Missouri, the state all my grandparents called home.

It was a long drive from Minnesota to Missouri — eight hours to visit one set of grandparents and twelve hours to reach the other pair. And of course, because we were kids, my brother and I peppered the trip with petty arguments and the ultimate of all annoying questions:

Are we there yet?

Perhaps, if my parents had stuffed the glove box with a copy of Kid Chat: 204 Creative Questions to Let the Imagination Travel, my brother and I would have had something else to occupy our minds.

The book’s authors, Bret Nicholaus and Paul Lowrie, came up with more questions than the summer is long to keep road tripping families from falling prey to the Are-We-There-Yet complaints. The book is overflowing with fun travel-related discussion starters that will pique everyone’s attention and encourage all bodies in the car to chime in.

For example, question 59 reads:

If you had to carry a suitcase with you everywhere you went and it always had to contain the same things, what would you put in it?

Or try question 196:

If you could do something to a rest area to make it really cool, what would it be?

Take Oprah’s Millennium Challenge

In a previous post I wrote about Oprah Winfrey’s plan to get more American kids interested in the world beyond U.S. borders. Her newest organization – O Ambassadors – encourages teens to get involved in volunteer mission work in developing countries.

Now I’ve spent a bit more time tooling around on her new site. I’ve discovered a fun online game that’s a part of the site.

The game is called the Millennium Challenge.

It’s like a board game except it’s on your computer screen. Your character clicks the spinner, moves the number of spaces the spinner says, and then you draw a card from the stack to see what it says.

Some of the cards are simply trivia about other lands. Other cards give you a task to complete that will help you learn something unique about another place.

But you can’t just willy nilly complete the cards. If you don’t finish your job in the given time, or if you didn’t read the directions and do it wrong, your character will be punished and you’ll have to move backwards.

It’s pretty fun. I recommend you give it a go and hop on over. But player beware.

The game does play a song that gets pretty annoying after a while. I was muting before I knew it.