The game involves keeping track of out-of-state license plates to see how many states you can find.

Pati Ballalobos, from Hermosa Beach, California, began to play the game with her son last summer. But she turned it into a game that taught geography, math and reading skills.

“We bought our son his own United States map,” she says. As her son found each out-of-state license plate, he recorded it on the map.

Then Pati would ask him other questions. They included:

• How far the car or truck traveled to get to our town.

• Locate the state capital.

• Check the newspaper to see what the weather was like there.

• Talk about what that state has that’s different from where we live.

The game was so much fun “the whole family got involved,” Pati says. Even his friends called to tell him where they had seen a certain license plate.

“Without going out of our way, my son saw cars from all but one of our fifty states and plates from Mexico and Canada, too,” Pati says. And the one he hasn’t seen? No, it’s not Hawaii or Alaska. To this day, he hasn’t seen Arkansas . . . .

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