Preparing Your Kids for a Disney Cruise

Nineteen years ago, I went with a friend on a Disney cruise vacation aboard the ship, Disney Magic.  This trip is what began my love for cruising.  Since then, I have been aboard several different Carnival and Royal Caribbean cruise ships with family and friends but have never boarded a Disney cruise again until recently.

A few weeks ago, we booked a spontaneous Disney cruise vacation.  But before all the magic began on the boat, I created a little bit of magic in our home to prepare my kids, especially my daughter, for what she should expect aboard the Disney Dream ship.

Magical Surprises and Learning Activities

First, you can read this blog post, to understand the beginning steps of how we surprised her with this magical vacation.  Then, we pulled out this Disney Cruise Adventure Book for Kids, to begin discussing all the details of this experience.  I found this book to be extremely helpful for my daughter.  She learned so much and was so aware as to everything that was occurring on the cruise.

I even learned some things myself!  Typically, I will just follow my husband around.  He is always my personal GPS on vacation.  But after working on this booklet with my daughter, we learned about the parts of the boat, and navigating made a whole lot more sense!

The Payoff

When we stepped foot on the cruise ship, my daughter was extremely interested in seeing our stateroom, the place where we would sleep.  She even used the word stateroom over and over throughout the cruise.  I loved that she used the actual word and appreciated all the rich vocabulary this booklet built for her.  When our stateroom was ready at 1:30pm, we located the seventh deck and began searching for our room.

To my surprise, my daughter grabbed her Disney Cruise Adventure Book for Kids out of the bottom of the stroller, flipped to the page where we had written our stateroom number, started looking at the numbers on the doors, and trying to find where we would stay.  There was even a time when the two of us went out exploring by ourselves and as we were returning to our room, I made a wrong turn, and she corrected me.  She said, there are seahorses over here, we have fish beside our doors.  So smart!! It made my heart with leap with joy to see her acting so mature.

The Disney Cruise Adventure Book for Kids also discussed the Mandatory Muster Drill.  I shared with my daughter that there would be a drill, sort of like a fire drill at school.  She listened to the announcement over the cruise intercom and informed us that the drill would be in five minutes.

I greatly appreciated the Disney Cruise Adventure book.  It taught my daughter so much and built so much background knowledge for her, prior to boarding the ship.  I’ve provided the Disney Cruise Adventure Book for Kids here through links but this is something you will receive after checking in online.  You might want to check to see if the one they provide you has any updates.  But I definitely recommend taking the time to do this with your children before boarding.  It will make the experience so much more educational and fun!

Talk About It:  Share a vacation you went on with your kids that was a great learning experience.