I’m an Ambassador for the #kodakavengers Linky Challenge. The Linky celebrates the power of Super Heroes as well as the DVD and Blu-ray release of Marvel’s Avengers Assemble, along with free printables for creating your own Super Hero adventure at home from Kodak. I’m highlighting the cool things you can do with the printables – join in and you could win £500 or one of 3 Kodak Hero 7.1 All-in-One printers plus Marvel’s Avengers Assemble on DVD! Find out more. 

Making an Avengers Superhero play city in a box

This week we decided to explore superhero play with the Avengers printable figures and posters from Kodak.

We assembled our Avengers superhero city in about half an hour, using the awesome free Avengers printables from the Kodak website and a cardboard box.  There was no pre planning, I know, you can sort of tell. To be honest I was going to enjoy making it on my own, when the kids were in bed, but they caught me at it and wanted to join in. Being 3 and 5, they are eager to get on with playing with whatever they make, and being impulsive types, we rarely craft to any kind of plan. So our Avengers city evolved before our eyes at a rate of knots.

Box worlds are my thrifty way of addressing my children’s need to worship at the altar of their cultural heroes.  We’ve moved on from our Nightgarden, Charlie and Lola and Dinoland box worlds. Time for something a little more grown up. Avengers Assembled is a 12A, my kids won’t be able to watch the DVD, but my research into superheroes convinced me they can be positive role models for play, even for children as young as mine. Superhero play is all about helping, rescuing and dancing on the boundary between good and evil.

I had vaguely envisioned ‘Avengers Assembled’ as a static scene, a kind of a comic book in 3D, but my 5 yo had her own superhero play ideas, she suggested we make holes in the side of the box and turn it into a puppet theatre, including holes behind the buildings so the characters could pop out. We had no lolly sticks to hand but it turns out that jumbo pipe cleaners are quite good fun.

Box worlds are an activity with loads of scope to engage children of all ages, older children could really develop and embrace the 3D futuristic city design and pay homage to the style of Marvel comics.

Here it is our superhero play in action, excuse my 3yo’s hiccups:

We used:

For the set

• a grocery box (I like boxes with lids so you can shove the lid on and keep all the world’s bits together when it needs tidying away.)
• Kodak Avengers poster printables as the back drop, printed on plain paper (Kodak cartridges are really good value so I’m pretty relaxed about colour printing).
• A toothpaste box, a tissue box and a ready meal box covered in white paper.
• Green and blue cellophane we found in our local scrapstore, but wrapping paper or any old paper would do, you can always colour it in or paint it.
• glue stick, scissors, black felt pen.

For the characters

Pipe cleaners or lolly sticks/strips of strong cardboard, selloptape and Kodak Avengers Printable Fold Figures printed on photo paper or card. Fellow ambassador Maggy from Red Ted Art has a detailed post on making up the puppets with lolly sticks, we bring you a set, if you like, for her creations.

For more superhero play and craft ideas check out #kodakavengers on Twitter. Remember to enter the Avengers competition over at Britmums, you can win £500 or 1 of 3 Kodak Hero 7.1 printers and ink, just by posting a photo of your child/family/self as an Avenger. See my last post for inspiration. Check out what Imagination Tree did too.

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