We love playing with cardboard boxes, they are definitely the best things at keeping the kids busy for ages!  We recently moved to a new house and were using our wardrobe boxes for a good couple of months before actually getting around to buying wardrobes.  So Ethan was very excited when he saw four massive boxes come down to the garden for him to play with, and right away he said 'let's make a rocket ship!'

It's so simple to get him started but just opening up the box for him, putting him inside and giving him some crayons and markers to start creating.  He wanted to draw controls for the rocket ship, buttons and a steering wheel so that he could drive it.  I wrote the numbers from 10 to 1 for him so that we could point at the numbers as we did a countdown.  Ivy joined in and scribbled around the rocket as well.  Ethan asked me to cut a window into the rocket so that they could see the moon.

We didn't end up with something that looked like a rocket ship to anyone else, I could have got out the silver paint and spent the whole day making the box look like a rocket, but instead they just got to play in it all day long.  We put the boxes away and Ethan continued to ask to have them out to play in every day.  It really doesn't take much to create a fun place to play and learn.