DIY fun: Cardboard box creativity

Challenge your kids’ inventiveness. Give them a few cardboard boxes and encourage them to make their own toys.

Planes, trains and automobiles – or dragons and dinosaurs. Cardboard creations are limited only by your child’s imagination.

Set a challenge for your kids to come up with the wackiest costume, the coolest character or the craftiest conveyancer. This kind of activity is a great framework for learning as your kids take creativity and pair it with basic engineering ingenuity.

Give them 2-3 cardboard boxes each, plus some tape, and let them go to it. They’ll be at it for hours, and you won’t have to spend a dime.

Young astronauts may like to make a rocket for intergalactic space travel.

Here them roar. Monsters, dragons or dinosaurs – whatever your little munchkins are into, they can make their own cardboard versions of them. That way, no little person will be harmed in the playing with them.

Learn how to make this fun plane from cardboard boxes in our free online magazine, Sweet Living, Issue 10. Click here to view.

It’s all in the details with this truck and trailer. Smaller boxes and corrugated cardboard are ideal for this project – unless a giant-sized truck is required, in which case giant boxes are called for.

Or how about a fine motor to get yourself from A to B – or across the room in style.