How to Make a Toy Barn

If you’re homeschooling preschool and working your way through a preschool farm unit, which all of us do at some point, we certainly did, then you’ll want to try to make this barn toy for with your kids. So let’s dig into how to make a toy barn from your recycling bin.

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Supplies to make a toy barn from recycling

an empty orange juice box or goldfish or anything that looks like the old cardboard milk cartons, construction paper, stickers or magazines to cut out, scissors, glue, markers

How to make a toy barn from recyclable materials

1. Gather your materials, sort through your stickers for things you might find in a barn. My boys had quite an imagination when it came to this (they were looking through a scrapbooking sticker kit) “Mommy, cows need to drink special drink. Let’s use this!” He was holding up a page of wine bottles, wine glasses, and grapes. I just nodded and thought, “You have no idea how special.”

2. Adult or older child, or young child if you’re not going to be worried about it fitting right cut out the sides of the barn. I did this, because my boys would have freaked out about getting it the right size, and wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much.

At this point, your third child will wake up, and you need to find supplies for her to make it as well, enter the orange juice box.

3. Set up the kids on the floor with lots of room to spread out, and in theory, you don’t have to worry about glue on the kitchen floor. Put stickers and pictures all over your barn. Honestly, pigs fly.

4. Once you’re all done decorating your walls, glue them to the boxes.

5. Now take the construction paper you’ve set aside and cut it into shingles for the roof, or as Superman did, cut it into one big piece and happily glue it on. Batman sat there and made confetti then glued little pieces on. Princess decided hers didn’t need a roof.

Extra Credit: cut holes in the barn so you can put animals in and out, we didn’t do this, but they’re perfectly happy with their barns.

And, here’s the finished product:

More fun ideas for kids

• Handkerchief doll craft
• Fine Motor Skills Game
• DIY Marbles game
• Me on the Map: draw my room
• Liberty Bell craft