Make a Passport and Take a Trip for the Holidays!

Your multilingual and multicultural children most likely have their own real passports which you have packed away for safe keeping. But there’s no fun in that! Help your children make their own passports and then take an imaginary trip to visit family abroad for the holidays!

To Make a Passport You’ll Need...
Photo of your child, cut so that only their face shows
Colored paper (both regular and heavy weight)
White paper
Stapler
Pens
Glue
Ink stamps (optional)

To Take A Trip You’ll Need...
Suitcases for each traveler
Different articles of clothing
Humor and laughter
Willingness to role play

Make Your Passports...
From the heavy-weight colored paper, cut out a rectangle. Fold it in half so that it becomes the front and back covers for the passport. Cut out a few white pieces of paper the same size as the heavy colored paper. Place these inside the colored paper and staple them all together in the middle to form a book. On the first inside page of the passport glue your child’s photo and write information next to it: Name, Age, Birth Date, etc. With the regular-weight colored paper, cut out a piece a little smaller than one sheet in the passport. Color it and add wording to make it into a VISA for travel to a specific country. Cut out smaller rectangles from the white and colored paper and use pens to make them into customs stamps. Or use the ink stamps as custom stamps. Let your passports dry while getting ready for your trip.

Take this opportunity to talk with your children in your language about the items used (paper, glue, stamps, etc.)! Discuss why a person travels and why they need a passport. Does everyone need a passport to travel to all countries? Which countries can you reach by car, train, boat and which can you only reach by plane? Help your children understand why people travel with different modes of transportation.

Time To Travel...
Now that everyone has passports, it is time to take that trip to visit family! Start by figuring out who will do the traveling and who you will visit. Then figure out how you will get there. Bus, train, plane? How about taking a cruise part of the way and then a train the last leg? Once you have decided the basics, figure out what you need to take with you. Will it be warm at this time of year or cold? Will you be swimming in the ocean or sledding in the snow? Don’t forget to bring the appropriate footwear! Find your children’s suitcases and have them pack them themselves. Talk about the different clothing types and colors. Use the opportunity to practice counting: Decide with your children how many shirts they need, how many pants, how many socks, etc. and then count them out together.

Once the suitcases are packed, make sure to bring a few snacks for the trip. With your children, put together a small bag with a few snacks and maybe juice boxs as well. Talk about which foods are best for the long trip (why chocolate in warm hands is not the best idea) and which snacks are your children’s favorites. Once everything is together, it is time to travel!

Set up destinations throughout the house. (You can do this ahead of time with your children or while your children are doing something else so that it is a surprise.) Say goodbye to your children and send them off on their imaginary trip to visit family! Tell them to give you a call when they arrive. Or, if you children would rather travel with you, all of you can take the trip together.

As your children make their way from home to their imaginary destinations, you can play the part of the host or have another child or family member do this. Are your children visiting grandma? Then pretend like you are grandma. Or maybe your children are visiting Aunt Emma? Have fun with the language and try your best to imitate the visited family member. Tell your children how much you have missed them and how delighted you are that they came for a visit. Ask them how things are back home and how mom and dad are. This is a great opportunity to role play with your children to get an idea of their feelings about family abroad and thoughts that might be on their mind.

Do the same as your children travel from one place to another. Perhaps they make a detour along the way to hang out on an imaginary beach or swim in an imaginary ocean? Or maybe they go hiking up an imaginary mountain and camp out under some imaginary pine trees. Each destination is full of opportunities to use vocabulary in your native language!

When your children arrive back home, make it a special time to sit and chat about their big travel adventure. Ask them how it felt to travel to visit family and their thoughts about it. What parts of their trip did they enjoy the most and which did they not like? Ask them to tell you what happened while they were visting each family member and what each of them said. Take this chance to get your children to use their language skills and to feel comfortable talking about how they feel about their extended family members living far away.

In the end it is time to unpack the suitcase again and put everything away. Do you still have the same number of socks? Better count them out together! And make sure to talk about which clothing was most useful at each location and which were not. Maybe next time you’ll all pack differently?

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