Ways To Help Kids Remember Family Trips

We absolutely love traveling with our children- even if they’re likely too young to remember the details. But I’ve been absolutely shocked at how much my kids do remember. Once I realized that kids actually do remember more than I ever anticipated, I started thinking about ways that we could help our kids remember the adventures we took them on.  Here are a few things that we do to help our kids remember family trips.

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Memory Board in Their Rooms

This one is so easy to put together. I simply hung up a few corkboards in my daughters’ rooms and then we add postcards from each trip to their memory boards. This also gives us a specific thing that they know they can pick out in gift shops while also keeping gift shops budget friendly! Every trip they can pick one postcard for their wall and one postcard for their travel albums.

Travel Albums with Notes

I also keep travel albums with postcards for them. Ideally, I’d love to add in printed family photos regularly, but I STRUGGLE with regularly printing photos. So at minimum, I add in a postcard in their album for each trip with a little note written on the back for them about the trip. (I still have a dream of writing longer letters to them, but this much more doable.)

If we pick up any other little scraps like tickets or junior ranger stamps, I add these right in their albums as well.

I leave the albums in their rooms for them to flip through whenever they want.

Displaying Family Pictures

I’ll be honest- I’m terrible at displaying family pictures. I have ten thousand on my phone and maybe seventeen in my actual house.

But I am trying to make sure that my kids can regularly see pictures from our trips. So far that’s looked like printing off a couple each year and hanging them on the fridge, but I’d really like to try something like Chatbooks this year to be better about printing off photos regularly and having them accessible to my kids.

But looking at pictures regularly not only of a location like they can on a postcard but of themselves on a trip will help reinforce those early memories.

Talking About Past Trips at Dinner

Family dinner is a non-negotiable for us, but when you’re sitting down to dinner with little kids every night you can quickly run out of things to talk about! So we often will turn to talking about past trips at dinner. We’ll prompt them with “remember when we saw….” and then let them run with it.

It’s helping them remember our family vacations and also giving us things to talk about at dinner besides the Paw Patrol’s latest adventure.

Include Them on Planning Future Trips

I know this one sounds a little nuts, but when we talk about places we would like to go as a family, we include our kids in the planning and dreaming. Along the way, we ask them questions like “What did you enjoy about this certain place?” or “What’s a special memory you made here?” or “Do you remember this hike we went on? Would you like to do something like that again?”

Along the way, they’re remembering family trips that made an impact on them while also buying into future trips. (And buy-in is one the best ways to avoid backseat whining on a long car ride.)

Christmas Ornaments

Another simple souvenir idea- and one that doesn’t add a lot of clutter to your home. We always try to look for a Christmas ornament while we’re traveling with our family. I’ll jot down the date either in the ornament box or directly on the back of the ornament so that we can remember when we went. And then year after year we share special memories of our family vacations as we decorate the tree together.

Extend Learning At Home

This is my favorite way to help my kids remember family trips. I create learning activities for them once we’re home to help them learn more about the places that they’ve been to. For example, after a Florida beach vacation, I put together a Florida preschool unit theme for my oldest daughter. The trip has piqued her interest in a new place, and the learning activities help increase her semantic knowledge about that place.

And for whatever reason, kids retain semantic information better than they do episodic memories. So by pairing her memories of family trips with semantic knowledge, I am hoping to help her remember those family memories better. Or at least continue to reap the benefits of traveling long after the trip is over.

I also love to find books for them about places we’ve been. It’s so much fun to read them bedtime stories and hear them say “Hey! We did that!”

If you’re interested in finding learning activities for different places that your family has traveled to, check out this section of the blog and sign up for email updates. These activities definitely take me the longest to create, but they’re also my favorite things to create.

And if you’re looking for trip ideas as a family, check out this section of my blog!