When left alone with a cardboard moving box or cardboard shipping box, kids will quickly come up with a variety of ideas for imaginative ways to play with it. Children who love fun indoor activities like playing with cardboard boxes will enjoy reading children's picture books about kids that turn cardboard boxes into different kinds of cardboard toys.
A Box Can be Many Things
The brother and sister in A Box Can Be Many Things by Dana Meachen Rau [Children's Press, 1997, ISBN: 978-05-16261539] show how a big cardboard box can be an eco-friendly, recyclable toy. Rescuing a discarded cardboard box from the trash, they transform it into cardboard playhouses such as a cave, a car, a house, and a cage. Once it has been reduced to pieces, they proceed to use even these small bits of cardboard as props for imaginative play.
The small amount of text makes this Rookie Reader book an easy read for beginning readers. The cute illustrations alternate between showing what the cardboard box really looks like and showing the imaginative scenarios the kids are picturing in their heads. Best of all, A Box Can Be Many Things portrays a positive, cooperative relationship between the brother and sister, depicting how they can have fun making pretend play toys together.
When the TV Broke
The young main character in the easy reader book When the TV Broke by Harriet Ziefert [Puffin, 1993, ISBN: 978-0140365405] is left to entertain himself after the family television breaks. After spending days of boredom trying to come up with a fun indoor activity, he realizes that he can use paint, scissors, crayons, and glue to transform ordinary cardboard moving boxes into a city of buildings with a train running through it.
The simple text makes this a fun read-aloud for kids or a story that early readers can read to themselves. The cardboard box city the boy builds is creatively designed, and children looking at it will doubtless be motivated to round up some cardboard shipping boxes and start constructing their own box cities.
Christina Katerina & The Box
The funny, realistic illustrations in Christina Katerina & The Box by Patricia Lee Gauch [Putnam Juvenile, 1998, ISBN: 978-0698116764] are detailed enough to act almost as how-to instructions for how to turn an ordinary cardboard shipping box into a range of different cardboard playhouses and play spaces. Christina Katerina is a spirited and clever heroine who holds her own against her friendly foil, Fats Watson, and comes up with a series of new ways to use the titular box to thwart her mother's attempts to drag it away to the trash barrel.
Like A Box Can Be Many Things, Christina Katerina & The Box shows how the same box can be turned into many different kinds of cardboard toys even after it starts to sag and fall apart. Christina and Fats turn the box over on its side, paint it, cut holes in it, and eventually stomp it flat and draw a floor plan on it, proving that with a little imagination, kids can always get just a little more use out of a box.
Though currently out of print, this lively children's picture book is well-worth tracking down through used booksellers or the library. It is suitable for kids ages 4 to 8, though younger children may enjoy it as well.
Webster and Arnold and the Giant Box
Though also out of print, Webster and Arnold and the Giant Box by P.K. Roche [Dial, 1980, ISBN: 978-0803794320] is also very worth tracking down. The two mice brothers in this sweet and sometimes hilarious Dial easy-to-read book use their imaginations to turn the giant cardboard shipping box they find outside into a cave, a train, a restaurant, a rocket ship, a submarine, and (once it has essentially caved in on itself) a slide on a hillside. As in A Box Can Be Many Things, the pictures in Webster and Arnold and the Giant Box shift between showing what is actually going on and what Webster and Arnold are imagining is happening.
This funny book not only gives readers ideas for how to play with a cardboard packing box; it also shows how Webster and Arnold deal with sibling bossiness, reach compromises while deciding who will play which role in each imaginative scenario, and (for the most part) provide a great model for how siblings can play well together.
Children's Books About Cardboard Boxes
Any one of these books will inspire kids to use their imaginations and perhaps also some art supplies to turn cardboard packing boxes from around the home into cardboard playhouses or other fun cardboard toys. For younger children, parents can also check out some cardboard box books for babies and toddlers and books that describe how to make different cardboard box crafts.
Renee Carver - Renée Carver has an Elementary Education degree and over ten years of experience writing and editing children's educational products.
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