Things You'll Need:
- square and rectangle-shaped recycled food containers of various sizes
- Construction paper, packaging paper, or contact paper
- newspaper
- Clear packing tape
- Scissors
- a collection of pictures
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Step 1
First you will need a collection of boxes. You can use boxes of all shapes and sizes. Shoe boxes, cereal boxes, pasta boxes, boxes that household items come in. All of these will serve wonderfully as rectangular blocks. Your blocks do not all need to be square or rectangular. Round oatmeal boxes are great for building towers and spaceships, for example.
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Step 2
Boxes that are somewhat flimsy, such as cereal boxes, should be stuffed with newspaper until they are full (but not bulging). After stuffing, use packaging tape to tape them shut.
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Step 3
Wrap the blocks using construction paper, packaging paper or colored contact paper. For construction paper and packaging paper you will need to use clear packing tape to secure the edges so that the wrapping doesn’t come loose during play. Contact paper is an excellent covering for your homemade blocks, but it is also a little more expensive.
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Step 4
For a touch of style, collect pictures of animals, children, or interesting objects and attach these onto the blocks using clear packaging tape. Plain blocks may be more likely to encourage children to concentrate on building, whereas blocks with pictures may encourage the use the blocks in other kinds of creative play, in ways that promote language development. The brown packaging paper I use for wrapping the blocks also makes a very nice surface for children to draw or color on, creating their own decorative patterns.
Comments
evascarlet said
on 11/3/2009 Great way to have fun, save money, and recycle too...