My three-year old son finds the basement parking lots in the malls interesting to watch. He can find huge number of real cars of different models and colours, all parked at one place; lined-up cars, winding roads and neatly drawn parking lines and indications. It is indeed an amusing sight for kids who play with toy cars.
We tried to make a cardboard parking lot to include in his play road mat. It is, perhaps, the most simple-to-make DIY toys I’ve ever done for him. In the pictures below, I’ve detailed easy steps to make a toy parking lot using cardboard and a few add-on road signs. If you are planning to make one for your toddler, this might be of some help. You can also customize the way you want. You can include other indicators or sign boards your kids are familiar with or those you want them to learn. You can write or paste numbers on the lots if you want them to learn numbers. You can build multiple-storied parking garages as well.
Steps for making a simple play parking lot
- Find a rectangular shaped cardboard box. Commonly, we get such boxes as packing material for sarees, shirts, shoes or with parcels.
- If you want it to look perfectly sophisticated, you might want to wrap the box with a chart or colour paper. However, remember that toddlers wouldn’t mind the finishing quality. Their excitement will be about the new play set-up and not necessarily the look of it.
- Cut open the sides of the box for entry and exit gates as shown in the image.
- Paste white paper for marking the parking slots.
- It is up to your imagination of what other indicators or signs you would like to put on the parking area. A parking sign board, entry and exit signs, numbering the lots etc. are a few.
- You can also use sign boards from other play sets like Lego as props for their play times.
Here’s our new parking lot:
If you would like to know how kids shall have fun playing with this kind of a parking lot, watch this video of my son playing with our parking lot. You can subscribe here for free to our YouTube channel, Vihaan’s Toys Plays Reviews, to get more such video updates to your e-mail.
If you tried making one, do share your comments of how your kids enjoy playing with a parking garage.
Here are more ideas for DIY play parking garage:
hi, was waiting for one such post from you! excellent. you must collate all such posts of yours and publish
Thank you. I’ve just began to post DIY stuff. Hope to post more in the coming days.
pleasure! waiting, let those nice thoughts roll out
Such a creative blog post!! Amazing how such beautiful little things can be made with all thats available at home!!
True Sneh, there’s so much we can offer our little ones with simple little things. Thank you.
Nice and simple. But I can guess the effort that went into the planning and making of the DIY parking lot!
Destination INfinity
Making such DIY stuff is simple until the little one sniffs out mama is into something 🙂 But having him along while doing little things like this is a good learning time for him. Now sometimes he imagines how new things can be done. Thank you.