We usually bring home our groceries in cardboard boxes, so I always have an abundance of them. When we don’t use them for throwing trash or storing things, I use them for various craft projects.
Most of the time, I end up making Summer and Emma all sorts of cardboard toys. They never last long, maybe three weeks max, even shorter if Emma has her way with it, but it’s a fun, inexpensive way to encourage creative and imaginative play at home. It’s also a great way to teach them how to recycle and be resourceful. Even if they break after a few days, it wouldn’t matter because they don’t cost a thing and we could easily make new ones.
Yesterday, I decided to spend the afternoon working on crafts with the girls and one of the things we made was a thin crust pepperoni and sausage cardboard pizza!
I simply cut a piece of cardboard in an 8-inch circle, divided it into four parts and used pieces of crumpled brown paper bag for the crust around it. I cut yellow and green strips of paper for the cheese and bell pepper toppings, and red and brown circles of felt sticker for the meat toppings. Summer glued the toppings herself and also decorated the box I had made for her pretend pizza.
She loved it! She carried it around for the rest of the day, offering me “hot” pizza from the box every ten minutes or so!
A lot of our junk at home can actually be recycled and made into kids’ play things. I’m not anti-toy store and occasionally, we do buy our kids toys, but I think that giving our children the experience of creating something out of nothing and encouraging them to be imaginative with the objects around them is more beneficial to them than always buying them the hottest toy at the store.
It was fun and entertaining making this with Summer. And I’m pretty excited to work on another DIY toy project. I wonder what we should make next. 🙂
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