Imagination + Box = Eco-Friendly Toy

When I think back to my childhood, I don’t have memories of toys or possessions. I remember playing outside until it was dark and making the bath water black because I was so dirty. A rock could be play money for playing store or twelve of them were a dozen eggs. A leaf suddenly became the dollar bill I needed to buy my dozen eggs! The ideas were endless and my imagination ran wild. That’s the natural thing about childhood, the imagination. It’s so fresh and vivid…and then we buy every plastic toy out there, videos, and video games and the vivid imagination fades. It’s sad really and I see it happening with my own four year old.

I’m an early childhood educator, I know that play is how children learn best. Not by watching a video, pushing buttons on a video game or having a thousand expensive toys at their fingertips. Children should be able to play with blocks and have them be more than just blocks. Blocks can turn into race cars, space ships, a house, a hamburger, and the list goes on. Too much has been created for our children and that takes away from their natural ability to imagine! Today I had a rebirth, I went to Fridge Blog. I had become desensitized as a parent and had lost touch with the basics of childhood and being a green mom!

April, with Fridge Blog, has an online store called, FridgeBoxWorld.com and it’s exactly what it sounds like, a place to buy a fridge box. As a preschool teacher, I’ve done dozens of cool things with a fridge box (bear caves, tree houses, haunted tunnels, play kitchens, castles, etc.) over the years. They were hard to come by and were usually broken down and damaged. With FridgeBoxWorld.com you get a heavy duty fridge box, you can use both sides, it’s eco friendly, non-toxic, made from recycled materials, and can be recycled. It keeps getting better…April donates a percent of her revenues to http://www.onepercentfortheplanet.org! Plus, Fridge Boxes to school teachers for sustainable storytelling workshops. Made in the U.S.A., no recalls to worry about and the children get to use their imagination to power this toy, not batteries.

I have one coming, thanks to April, and plan to build a hot air balloon out of it with my son’s preschool class! This was my favorite project when I was a preschool teacher! I’ll post the pictures here for you to see. In the meantime, visit the Fridge Blog and reconnect with what is natural about childhood…playing and the imagination.