I wrote about Fort Magic a few weeks ago.
About a fort kit for kids that has turned our house into a creative construction zone—in such a good way. It has added a new level of family interaction and collaboration during the building phase and has inspired all kinds of imaginative play afterward.
This fort kit for kids has just been announced as a winner of the Dr. Toy’s Best Classic 2014 Toy Award! Plus they will be featured on the ABC.com TV show Shark Tank tomorrow (Friday, April 18th) at 9pm EST.
If I had a blog post for every time we built something new with Fort Magic, you would be reading about nothing but construction on The Artful Parent.
We’ve made a:
- Castle
- Fort
- Submarine
- House
- Teepee (in the backyard)
- Series of tunnels (in the front yard)
Here are a few photos of various things we’ve built with this fort kit:
Plus the Fort Magic has been more than just a fort kit for us. The construction pieces have been used for:
- Airplane steering wheels
- An alternative to the tin can telephone (the kids rigged up a long series of the tubes to go between two rooms and it worked great for sound travel!)
- Water bead shooters (don’t ask)
- Magic wands
- And, um, possibly swords
Construction is fun, creative, and educational. We all know this, right? Kids are simultaneously learning about science, math, and how the world works.
And if your kids are like mine, they’ll try out some of the forts in the booklet provided, then moved on to their own designs — some workable, some not so much — but that’s part of the learning process.
Maia and her friend Isabella decided to build an igloo during a playdate yesterday.
While most of our previous Fort Magic construction has been inspired by ideas from the booklet provided (even if we altered a few things here and there) they immediately began building this time without even cracking open the booklet.
The third graders provided most of the manpower (and musical accompaniment) with 4 year old Daphne mostly jumping around, dancing, delivering connector pieces to the older girls, and fitting tubes over each of her fingers.
When they were mostly finished, they stood back and realized that while their roof of their igloo was curved, the walls were all angular.
And so they enlisted Harry’s help…
…to turn their angular igloo into a rounded one using the pieces provided in the fort kit. It worked!
These kids are always so excited about how BIG they can build with this fort kit. I think they’d move into one of these constructions if I let them.
Once the igloo was built, it was time to cover it. With white, of course.
We used some of the extra clips to add a string of white Christmas lights to the Fort Magic fort as we did last time. Just because they make everything more magical.
The girls made water balloon babies (drawing faces on water balloons), donned silly faces that Maia had created, and moved in.
(If you check back in a couple of days, I’ll share how they created their own artful floor for the fort with tape… although you may have seen a sneak peak if you follow The Artful Parent Facebook page orInstagram.)
