Book and Activity!

This guest post is from Amy from Media Macaroni, Amy’s blog is devoted to all things kids media and her love of books and toys are evident!  I love how they used a book as a leap pad for play and more learning!  Enjoy!

The book that I can’t help but think about constantly as I’m at toy store after toy store buying presents is David Shannon’s Too Many Toys , one of our household favorites. The other day I cleared out what can only be described as rubble out of my daughter’s room. You know what I’m talking about: the broken plastic yo-yos and noisemakers from birthday party bags, bent up pieces of paper from that origami phase, little unidentifiable pieces that will never be matched with the toy they came from. All I could think was, “I’m seriously bringing more into this room?!”

In Too Many Toys, little Spencer has way too many toys, a sight all too familiar. The toys cover the floors and spill down the hallway. They cover the yard and the bathroom. But, Spencer’s toys were becoming a household hazard. Spencer’s mom (perhaps one of the most relatable moms in a picture book ever) finally loses it when she trips on railroad tracks while carrying a load of laundry. She haggles, bribes, coaxes, and threatens Spencer to start getting rid of toys. Spencer’s mom is victorious when there’s a giant box full of toys to be banished, but when she returns from a tea break, she discovers the toys emptied all over the hall. There’s Spencer, astronaut helmet on, sitting in his new cardboard rocket. Forget all the toys – the box is the best toy EVER!

We took this to heart one day, and built our own rocket out of a gigantic cardboard box. To be authentic to the book, we taped pencils and cardboard tubes to the outside, and drew a nice assortment of planets and blinking lights. One of my favorite features was the control panel that we made on the inside. We drew a numbered keypad beside a list of planets and numbered codes. All you had to do is punch in a three-digit number and you were transported to that planet.

No wonder the cardboard box has been inducted into National Toy Hall of Fame . It’s hard to imagine a better way to spend a morning.