Instead of letting the kids watch DVDs during your next road trip, use those long hours in the car to sharpen their minds.
That’s the advice from Dr. Katherine Wiesendanger, an education professor at Longwood University in Farmville, Va. She offers these tips for turning those mindless hours in the car to mind-sharpening opportunities.
Official Navigator
No minivan sallying forth to vacation wonderlands can arrive without a designated navigator. Why not appoint your child to the post? An official trip navigator’s title and duties are a great way to reinforce map reading, mathematics and geography skills.
Dr. Wiesendanger recommends that during the trip, parents require the navigator to trace the family’s progress on a map. Every hour, call for an official report from the backseat, asking the navigator to detail location, current direction of travel, the next exit, the nearest town and the next state.
Mom or Dad can also add a mathematics component to navigator reports by asking for the total miles traveled and remaining, which the navigator can learn to compute using location information and the map’s scale. The...