If your daughter wears a Girl Scout uniform or if you just have a certain love for Samoas or Tagalongs, you may have an overabundance of the medium-sized, rectangular boxes lying around the house. Instead of sending them to the recycling bin, use them for crafts around the house. Your kids will love the new toys they can create.
Stack Them Up
These little rectangles make the perfect building blocks for walls, houses, fort and other play structures around the house. You will need a lot of boxes — at least 10 to 20. More boxes are even more fun. Ask friends and relatives for their empty boxes. Because they are light and handsized, kids can manipulate them easily and you don’t have to worry about them falling down. Use duct tape or packaging tape to close the top and bottom of the boxes. If you are preparing the blocks, you can spray paint with a stone or other textured spray paint. If the kids are helping, paint with acrylic paint or cover in brown or dark red paper so they look like bricks. Once they are dried, let kids build structures to their hearts’ content.
Drive Them Around
If your kids love transportation, turn the boxes into trains, trucks, cars and other vehicles. Paint the boxes with acrylic paint. You might think of using yellow for a school bus or white or brown for a truck. Cut wheels, headlights and mirrors from craft foam or construction paper. Glue them to the boxes. A parent or other adult can cut holes for windows and cut holes in the top for a doll to be a driver or a passenger. Use markers to decorate the sides and to draw a license place. You might want to decorate trucks with a specific logo or your child’s name.
Display Them
Girl Scout cookie boxes are ideal for panoramas and displays. Tape the top and bottom closed and cut out a window from the largest side. Paint the outside and inside a neutral color, such as black. Give your child construction paper and craft foam and let him cut out different items for the scene of his choice. Trees, animal, flowers, stars, moon or sun all help create a scene. Set up the display so the box is horizontal on its side. For an interactive display, cut a slit on the side of box, under the display. Glue cut out characters, like paper dolls, to frozen treat sticks and slide them up through the slits. Let kids develop original stories.
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