Thursday, June 25, 2009

Milk Carton Blocks

How could I forget the milk carton blocks??? In my block play post I completely left them out so when they got pulled out the other day for bowling I knew I had to come back and share this idea with you all. These are basically home made preschool "brick blocks" you know the ones...from Romper Room fame?

How do you make them?
  • You'll need two cardboard milk cartons per block.
  • Cut the tops of each carton.
  • Insert one carton inside the other making sure the bottom seams are perpendicular to each other. This makes for a stronger block!
  • Push in from both ends so the top end of one carton is flush with the bottom of the other one.
  • You can cover them with contact paper, but then you might as well buy a set because that ups the cost of the blocks considerably. I left mine as is.
We actually gave this set to E10 when he turned 2 years old! I asked my MOPS friends to save their milk and orange juice cartons for me and and collected as many as I could. It was helpful that a local dairy store was having a sale on half gallons of milk at the time and people were buying lots of it when normally they would get a gallon container. I was able to have a set of 24 blocks or so.

These have all sorts of uses from building forts to sailing vessels to providing obstacles for courses to making pins for bowling when the 4yo desperately wants to go bowling.

We store them on a lower shelf on the toy shelf in the post below. Honestly that is the only drawback. They take up space.
We love these blocks. I hope you can make a set today!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Could you make these with kleenex boxes? Then you'd have rectangles and squares.

Marie-Anne

Heather said...

Milk cartons are much stronger. The Kleenex boxes wouldn't last a day!

Just my opinion though...based on trying to make guitars out of Kleenex boxes. ; )

Heather