Brooke Wheeler, a stay-at-home mom to two young children in Gretna, wrote this guest blog for momaha.
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How many of you parents out there get frustrated when your kids complain about being bored?
My kids are still pretty young. So they don’t necessarily say, “I’m bored,” but sometimes their actions sure do.
I often feel like my house is being overtaken by toys. When I hear them complain about boredom, I wonder how on earth that could be noting all of the toys? While I may not fully understand it, I do know that kids just get bored with their toys sometimes.
What I have found is that it helps to approach playing with certain toys a different way. Take Hot Wheels for example. If you are a mother of boys, chances are pretty good that your household has some Hot Wheels. If you are like me and have more than one boy in the family, chances are you have boxes of them.
I’ll show you a super easy and fun activity to do with them. Got your cars? Good. Now grab a roll or two of masking tape, and some scissors, because we’re going to make a masking tape race track.
What’s great about this activity is that there is no right or wrong way to do it. I set our track up in our basement, while the kids were having lunch and surprised them with it when they were done eating. I think setting it up on your own is a good approach for those of you with small children.
If you have older children, you might want to let them help. I found that my oldest son was intrigued with the creation of the track, and wanted to make his own, which was wonderful and only spurred more creativity and fun. My boys had so much fun with this, and it got them playing with toy cars that they didn’t even remember they had.
Materials
Masking tape
Scissors to cut tape
Toy cars
Directions:
1. Arrange pieces of masking tape to make a race car track.
2. Create pit-stops along the track (parking garages, gas stations, etc).
3. For a fun little twist, make your track go up onto your furniture (couches, ottomans, etc).
4. Get out your toy cars and let your kids loose to have some racing fun!
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