Making traffic jams fun (or at least bearable) with writing!

Traffic jams can make long family drives stressful and frustrating. But they can be made a lot less painful with writing! And – who knows? – they might even become educational experiences too. 

Here are several ways in which you can make traffic jams easier for everyone in the car, so once the incident causing the traffic jam is finally resolved, you will all still be friends.

1. Write descriptive pieces about the cars around you

If the car opposite you has a fantastic two-tone paint job, encourage your children to write about it. The dark blue darting into a pool of light blue on the Audi across from you is definitely worth at least a paragraph. Describing the Italian sports car next to the hard shoulder should take up at least a side of A4. 

 

If you make sure that a large supply of paper and our Love Writing Co. pencils are in an easily accessible section of your car at all times, then the possibilities are endless. Anything that distracts the kids from the fact that the same car has been stuck in front of you for the last hour will be a welcome addition to the journey at this point! Because our pencils have a wide diameter, a hexagonal shape and are the correct length they are also easier for your child to hold and control making them simple to use on the move too. 

 

2. Take some colouring pencils too

Stories become even better when they are illustrated with great drawings. As well as bringing the best out of stories, pictures can add new elements to these stories. Our Love Writing Co. fully erasable colouring pencils can come to the rescue in a traffic jam by allowing your kids to draw their favourite parts of the cars they are writing about, and even improve these cars if they don’t like their colour schemes. 

3. Practice writing new words

Traffic jams give you time, and any time is a great time to increase your child’s learning. You could challenge your children to write as many new words as they can to describe the traffic jam. 

Having to think of all these new words will take your children’s minds off the tedium through which they are sitting and may well make the experience more enjoyable for everyone. Monotonous, turgid, sluggish; the descriptive possibilities for this queue of cars are endless! There should be at least enough adjectives to last until the next motorway services.

4. Play writing games

 

There are tons of great writing games you can give your kids to avoid boredom while improving their writing. These include:

• Hangman (guessing letters in a word before time runs out)
• Pass-around-story writing (where each person adds a word or sentence to the previous sentence)
• Written Pictionary (where one person writes a description, the next person draws the description)

5. Write song lyrics together

Many of the world’s most popular songs have benefited at some point from either a rewrite or a remix. Get your children to write and rewrite lyrics to their favourite songs – soon they’ll be giggling away!

 

Hopefully these tips will make any traffic jam your family finds themselves in more bearable. At the very least, they will help your children use the time to improve their writing skills.