- giant cardboard cut out aka: secret passage way
Every few months I head to a local furniture store with my utility knife to ‘harvest’ some sheets of cardboard Cruise can play with. This sheet here comes from an empty plasma TV box. I cut a few boxes up and bring them home in my CRV.
Here, I used my utility knife to cut out an interesting shape Cruise can walk through into his room.
Other things we’ve done with large sheets of cardboard:
1. Using markers, we’ve drawn a little town Cruise drove his toy vehicles on.
2. Using blue painter’s tape (my favorite kid toy!) taped three cardboard sheets into an A-frame triangle as a cardboard tent (two sheets lean on each other, one sheet is the floor- tape the seams).
3. One large cardboard sheet is leaning against a tree in our backyard, a few trimmed branches from another tree are leaning against the sheet to camouflage it- another secret shelter.
You don’t have to wait until you buy a stove, fridge, etc. for your kids to have tons o’ cardboard fun. This is what I did to find out free supply of large cardboard boxes:
1. Called a local furniture store and asked if they had boxes. They do, at the back of the store where the trucks load (shipping/ receiving/ loading?). Asked permission to come down and take some with me.
2. Park in shipping receiving area. Ask nicely at that desk if I could take any empty boxes home with me (mention it’s for my son to play in). Most empty boxes are from items they plan to display and they break the boxes down for recycling pretty quickly. Usually there are some empty plasma tv boxes, which are limiting in their narrow shape, but great if you cut and use the large sides of the boxes. Also, much easier to get flat sheets v. box home.
Happy cardboard hunting! Feel free to contact me for more tips or post/ write here about what you made.
yours in outside the box creative play-
DeAnn
