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What is a Cardboard Playhouse?
A cardboard playhouse offers children an easily assembled miniature house that they can decorate themselves. Since children turn refrigerator packaging into houses and cars anyway, purchasing a kit to build a fancy cardboard structure makes sense. The house assembles with a few folds and tabs, leaving a white canvas for children to fill with accessories like a mailbox or window curtains.
You can buy a cardboard playhouse folded up flat. With easy to follow instructions, you just tuck in a few tabs, break open perforated doors and windows, and attach the pitched roof. Their size varies to accommodate children from 3-8 years old. Although ideal for temporary assembly indoors, they could also stay outside on a dry pavement away from rain.
The best feature of a cardboard playhouse is the potential for your child to customize his or her own house. Rather than being made of brown cardboard, these special kit houses have plain white exteriors. Some come pre-decorated with simple black outlines of windowpanes, a doorknob, mailbox, and roof tiles.
Just like a coloring book, this allows your children to express their creativity by coloring in the blanks with crayons, markers, or paint. Maybe they will want to match their own house or let their imagination run wild. Encourage them to fill in curtains, flowers, a chimney, or draw in pets or birds.
Even after they've painted the exterior of the cardboard playhouse, they have hours of amusement. Children use miniature houses to pretend to be grown-ups. They'll delight in checking the mail, mowing the lawn, cooking a barbecue, or simply coming home from work. Set up the playhouse for a birthday party or special weekend. For space-efficient storage, it will fold up flat for next time.
A good cardboard playhouse should minimize sharp corners by hiding the folds and grooves. It should also provide good ventilation. Test its resistance to tipping over so that during rough-housing, no one gets hurt. As with any large, interactive toy, check on kids frequently to make sure the playhouse hasn't torn, dislodged, collapsed, or caught anyone's clothing.
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![A cardboard box, which can be used to make a playhouse.]()
By: Kayros StudioA cardboard box, which can be used to make a playhouse. -
![Children may choose to paint a cardboard playhouse.]()
By: angellodecoChildren may choose to paint a cardboard playhouse.
Discussion Comments
Making or using some sort of playhouse is a great thing for healthy development of the young. Whatever the gender or individual life path or inclination or talents or interest,all children will grow up and live in some sort of housing, and so it shows something neat, when they want to get practicing for the "house in their head".
Before ready-made ones were available, a new range in the kitchen meant the children could have fun with big box, with Dad or Mommy checking to be sure there were no big staples or dangerous edges. But then what fun - till we softened and collapsed the whole thing from use and rolled down the hill inside it. If no cardboard house shows up, a child will go outdoors and gather sticks and stones to create walls and 'move in' and make a life; or do the same in playroom or schoolroom; or line up 4 chairs and put a blanket on top.
Parent supervision is necessary, of course, leaving lots of freedom to grow in experience and safely.
thanks for the neat story - it brought back the happy memories of childhood and parenthood!
Are the playhouses cardboard or corrugated board? There is a difference between the two. I would not have thought cardboard would be strong enough to build a playhouse. Corrugated board can be made very strong.
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