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Toddler Airplane Activities You'll Definitely Want to Use On Your Next Flight

How can you keep your kids entertained, actively learning, physically active and making new friends while aboard an airplane on a long flight?! Easy! Check out our full guide to fun and educational toddler airplane activities!

Do you love flying? Of course, you do as it takes you to different places and lets you enjoy your vacations. However, what about traveling with kids? Oh, taking your toddler on a plane with you can be scary. The unlimited bundles of energy can create quite a ruckus in a flight unless you are prepared to channelize their force of nature. Flying with toddlers can be a daunting task unless you are well prepared to entertain your kids in-flight. Let’s discuss a few toddler airplane activities that you can enjoy, and gadgets you can bring along to keep your kids engaged, entertained and learning while on a long flight.

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Planning your journey – pack kid’s friendly activities

Traveling time, duration, the age of your kids and the things that interest them will decide what travel activities you will plan for them to be used on an airplane. If you are flying short distances, you may not have to worry much. But thorough advanced preparation for long flights makes all the difference if you arrive at your destination happy or weary.

When packing games and kids' travel activities, don’t take anything that will disturb the co-passengers. Your toddler may love to play with robotic animals, but you don’t want anyone to be upset at you for the sound that these toys make. Remember, many passengers are trying to catch up on sleep during long flights, and if that were you, would you want some kids activity or a toy to make it impossible?

Otherwise, anything that fits on the tray table keeps your youngsters happy and engaged, is easy to pack, and is non-disruptive are welcome on a flight. Below is a long list of all possible kids' travel activities a toddler can enjoy on a plane.

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Entertaining Toddlers During Flights

Toys

There are a few toys that kids adore and can spend hours playing with them. Miniature cars? Yes! Pack a few in your handbag and let your kids’ imagination run wild as they drive them on the armrest, the tray table, and even on your arms and legs. Any time we travel our toddler Cosmos carefully selects 5-6 cars to take with him on a plane.

Animals, dinosaurs, dogs, or transformers – most kids love to indulge in role-playing with their favorite family of playthings. Pack the set that they love the most and together, you can have a lovely time on a rescue operation of tigers or take a ride at Jurassic Park. For younger toddlers, a wooden activity board can be a wonderful option to take on a plane.

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Lego

Small Lego sets? Another hit with children of all ages! Choose a set according to their age and let them build, visualize, and reconstruct whatever they like. 

Keep in mind however that Legos are costly, and an airplane is the worst place to misplace the tiny pieces.

TIP: A good idea may be to pack your legos into a reusable food container so the tiny details won’t slip and fall o nthe floor.

Another strategy to make this construction kids airplane activity available to your little one is to invest in inexpensive building sets that are available in toy stores. 

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Puzzles

Puzzles are also worth carrying on a plane for toddler curious minds. Costing just a few dollars, you can find them in different sizes that are worth investing for your tykes. Get the ones that fit on the tray table and you will have the little head pouring over them without disturbing anyone.

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Playdough

Well, playdough is messy if you cannot handle it properly. But if your kids love them, carrying a few tubs will give you the necessary peace of mind that you deserve. Let the young ones remain busy with the mushy balls but don’t forget to scrub the remains from the seats or your clothes. Combined with the other imaginative toddler airplane activities, such as playing with puppets or little cars and animals, playdough can be used to build garages, bridges, and even trampolines.

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Koosh Ball for Kids

No matter how much your toddler loves to play with balls, you cannot allow her to carry one on a plane. However, Koosh Balls are different. They don’t roll on the floor, hurt anyone and are perfect to keep those tiny hands busy. Relaxing as well as interesting to play with, Koosh balls are ideal as airplane kids’ activities.

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Toddler Airplane Activities for Learning

Are your toddlers too fussy and overly active? Do you want them to play as well as learn when they are flying? Here are more ideas for kids' airplane activities that actually promote active learning.

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Coloring Books

An all-time favorite with kids, you can never go wrong with coloring books – those make for a perfect travel activity! The exciting part is nowadays the coloring books are available in different formats. From the simple ones that involve crayons to magic pens and water pens, to some awesome travel-inspired colouring books, the kids love honing their skills with these colorful books. Magic pens are fun to work with as the colors only appear on the books.

TIP: When flying, give preference to triangle-shaped crayons that don’t roll.

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Keep Kids Busy With My Busy Books

My Busy Books are good to engage toddlers with a story and 12 figurines for role play. They are available in different themes and you can get the one that excites your children. There are other toddler activity books you can take with you for your airplane flight of course, but we find these the most entertaining.

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Magnetic Board Games

Check out Imaginetics or Create-A-Scene magnetic playsets – exciting and learning kids airplane activity. Without any fear of losing the small pieces, your children will be happy to create the scenes on the magnetic boards with the figures.

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Get a Set of WikkiStix

There is no limit to imagination and you can witness that when you give your kids a set of WikkiStix. From simple two-dimensional shapes to intriguing three-dimensional figures, allow them to explore, learn, and remain busy with WikkiStix.

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Sticker Books

Both toddlers and preschoolers love sticker books – these could be a wonderful kids airplane activity! They are entertaining, good for learning and allow the children to develop their motor skills. Inexpensive and available at most dollar stores, you can always pack one or two of these sticker books when flying with your children.

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Playing Cards on Flights

Cards have gone versatile. You can find travel cards that come with interesting information and pictures of different things or places. These are easy to carry and you can have lovely conversations with your young ones as you learn new words and discuss the cards.

For children who are just learning to spell, flashcards are great to keep them busy on a flight. Innovate games with the cards and your active kid will be eager to play with you.

One of the playing card games that Cosmos absolutely loves and is now extremely good at is Spot It! This card game that can be played between any number of 2-8 people, promotes both learnings of words and objects, attention and reaction. We play it in different languages too! If there is one game I could recommend with my eyes closed – that would be Spot it!

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Observation, Attention and Imagination Games

The greatest challenge you face while traveling with kids is to prevent them from getting bored and disturbing others. Kids also get cranky when they are holed up in one place for a long time. 

One good way to catch their attention is to allow them to imagine. Luckily the airplane window provides a “live streaming” of the most imaginative content: clouds, sky, and endless landscapes! Simply looking out the window could be a travel activity your kids may enjoy for hours!

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Clouds & Sky

Try a simple game like “How do the clouds look?”. Encourage your child to look at a cloud and guess if a cloud resembles any animal, and spin a story around it will help you to bond with your kids and also keep them quiet for a while.

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Finger Puppets

We all made finger puppets with sketch pens and a little imagination and now you can teach your children to do the same. With your active participation, the children can make interesting faces and engage in role plays with the finger puppets – a grand and simple way to engage them.

You can buy ready-made plush finger puppets too. We found these extremely handy when Cosmos was between 12mo and 2.5 yo. 

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Stretching & Exercising

Toddlers can become quite restless on a plane, and you can't blame them! If a long flight is uncomfortable for you as an adult, imagine how tiresome it must feel for a little kiddo who is full of energy and it just itching to run around and play! Instead, the poor ball of energy is confined to an airplane seat… 

One way you can help both of you is to add an airplane exercise and stretching routine to your long flight. Let’s say you commit to doing a set of body moves and walking every hour and help your child through guided exercises. I’ve written about the need and benefit of stretching and exercising while on a plane sometime in the past. You can find my suggested full-body routine here: Simple Exercises To Do On An Airplane To Actually Enjoy Your Flight

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Making Friends

Walk around with your children, ask them to talk to other kids on a flight (provided the other parents do no mind). 

Allow your children to talk to and make friends with the crew members, and let them help the flight attendants in distributing sweets or other small items. 

Just make sure that your little ones don’t misbehave, are too loud or disturb others and you will have memorable and stress-free flying experiences.

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iPad and Tablet Use 

Many parents are hesitant to take an iPad, a tablet, or other electronic gadgets inflight. Somehow using electronics with your young kids bears a stigma, and you as a parent are instantly judged to be a “bad parent” if you decide to use them. We want to call BS on that!

Our family is NOT an opponent of electronic gadgets, tablets, phones, cartoons, youtube, and other online stuff. In fact, we DO support and celebrate the use of modern technology with young kids – the younger the better! We are strong believers that limiting your kids’ access to modern technology is similar to past limitations placed on women: “women should not read books”. It is outright silly.

…and frankly, you shouldn’t be concerned with what other people think anyways – most of your fellow passengers you will never ever see again. 

You see, it all depends on HOW you use the gadgets. 

Yes, it is indeed it is inadvisable to expose your child to LED blue light that screens emit at least 2-3 hours prior to bedtime. It is also inadvisable to spend long amounts of time sitting still, or having your screen too close to your eyes. But provided you’ve addressed all of the safety concerns, by all means, DO take your iPad or tablet with you!

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Educational Cartoons

Any time we are about to embark on a long international journey, we preload our tablet with all sorts of cartoons. Your child peacefully watching cartoons (and learning!) can be the most rewarding kids travel activity you can bring with you – for YOU. You DO deserve a break sometimes, you know 🙂

We do however indeed screen and carefully pick the content that our toddler is to engage with. ..and we seldom allow him to watch cartoons for more than 20-30 min straight without some kind of hands-on activity break.

Few tips to select appropriate content:

• All content must be age-appropriate.
• No violence, weapons, fighting, or unruly behaviour displayed. 
• We prefer cartoons that are 10-15, a maximum of 20 minutes long, so we can easily “portion out” the delivery.

Cartoons must either educate or have a clear storyline. 

For example, for our 3yo Cosmos, we typically select few cartoons with the alphabet and counting sequence, vocabulary on a particular topic (eg. a cartoon listing 25 fruits with images, spelling, and pronunciation), basic math. 

We’ve also discovered a few interesting professionally done animated YouTube shows, that are now at the top of our list due to age-appropriate science-focused learning experience these shows provide. One of such shows that we recommend to your toddler is TreeSchool.

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Learning Foreign Languages 

You’ve probably heard that the younger you are the easier it is to learn a foreign language. Exposure to and learning languages helps your child with “brain wiring”. In our household, we already speak two languages – English and Russian – but we always encourage our son to learn more. 

Depending on the destination we are visiting, we select content teaching basic words or phrases in the language of a destination. For example, we are flying to Cuba in a few weeks, therefore we have already preloaded our tablet with cartoons and apps that teach basic Spanish. Cosmos is now learning how to say “hello” and “thank you” in Spanish. 

Learning languages is both fun and useful! It will help your child meet new friends and navigate around! Considering most of the time you send on a plane is “wasted on travel”, using it to teach your toddler a new language could be a wonderful idea!

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Apps & Games

It is a known fact that kids learn better through play – so the kids' travel activities you choose for them should be as fun as possible! As such a careful selection of apps you can add to your tablet can help both: keeping your little ones entertained while on a long flight, and helping them to learn a new skill or two!

You can select from all sorts of puzzle apps, drawing, quest apps, and even some apps that introduce advanced technology into your child's life, such as basic software development skills or even basic robotics.

One app that Cosmos absolutely loves and is very good at already is Croco Adventures. Croco Adventure is a game that teaches kids logic and programming concepts by using a very simple block coding interface to solve fun challenges for the Croco – a little crocodile looking for treats. With the help of directional blocks, your child learns to build and “debug” real-life algorithms.

Whatever game apps you end up selecting for your toddler to use on a plane, the same as with cartoons, at a very minimum these have to be age-appropriate and free from violence of any kind.

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Whatever toddler airplane activities you decide to pack for your next flight, knowing your child’s interests and preparation is the key. More Travel Tips are HERE!

Are you a traveler parent who frequently takes your toddler on a plane? Do you have other suggestions or ideas on fun and educating kids' travel activities? Share in comments! Or send us a message!

Oh.. and by the way, if you'd like to learn our tips and tricks on saving money on family travel, check out this article: Insider Hacks to Start Saving Money on Family Travel Today

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Enjoy!

Cheerfully yours,

Alexandra, Alex & Cosmos

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