Recycled Gingerbread Village
Build your own winter wonderland by turning cardboard boxes into a gingerbread village!
While You Play
Pinkalicious and Peter love to build and create new works of art, including gingerbread houses! This holiday season, your child can have fun with arts and crafts by building and decorating their own gingerbread houses - just like Pinkalicious and Peter.
In the winter holiday season, people often decorate their houses and bake warm, delicious foods. One popular winter food is gingerbread. There are gingerbread cookies, gingerbread loaves, gingerbread friends, and even gingerbread houses and villages! In this activity, you and your child can create a (non-edible) gingerbread village using recycled cardboard boxes. While you build, talk about the purpose of each building. Are there houses? Stores? Gingerbread schools? What will your village look like?
Materials
- Small cardboard food boxes (ex: tea, cocoa or oatmeal boxes)
- Glue gun
- Chalk or markers
Directions
- Gather a collection of cardboard boxes. Decide what buildings you want to include in your recycled gingerbread village.
- Open each box and turn it inside out. Then glue the box back together inside out so that the plain side is now visible.
- Use chalk or markers to draw gingerbread houses on the boxes. You can use one box per house or stack and glue boxes together to create larger buildings. You can also use different colored markers to add decorations to the houses. Or decorate the houses with pom poms, sequins, buttons, tissue paper or any other colorful art supplies you have available.
- Draw on all of your boxes to create your recycled gingerbread village.
- Set your village up on a table and enjoy it with your family.
Proud of your creation? Snap a photo and share it with us on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. We’d love to see how it turned out!
This craft comes to you from the creators of Pinkalicious and Peterrific.
Iowa PBS STEAM Activities and Crafts provided by PBS KIDS Parents.