Paper houses can be made from stiff paper, with doors and windows drawn or cut out. These are easily made, and a source of amusement for a rainy day, but not highly valued because not enduring.
Wooden houses are the joy of childhood. A house small enough to be convenient indoors, or large enough to play in outdoors, is one of the chief rights of childhood. For children under six or seven years, a packing box can be used. Two boxes of the same size make a two-story house. The children can scrub, sandpaper, paint, the outside and floors, design or saw out windows, put in partitions to divide into separate rooms, add a slanting roof and chimney. Doors may be added with hinges. Bricks may be made of clay and fastened together with cement or glue for a tiny brick house. Staircases are made of strips or blocks of the wood.
Children over seven can build a real wooden house with a little suggestion. They are also able to make small cement blocks for a block house. Boys of ten or twelve can make a log hut.
Trains, Wagons, Boats, Vehicles. Pasteboard vehicles can be made from spool boxes, candy boxes, match boxes. For wheels use spools, round wooden buttons, round box covers, milk bottle covers, circles cut from pasteboard. For axles use skewers, toothpicks, nails. Axles and wheels may be tacked, sewed, or pasted to the wagon. Axles may be dispensed with, and the wheels pasted directly to the wagon box. Dashboards, seats, canopies, foot rests, smokestacks, cowcatchers of paper or pasteboard can be pasted on, or attached with brass paper fasteners.
Paper wagons and cars can be made from a paper square folded into sixteen small squares, the sides and ends turned up and pasted, and paper circles pasted on for wheels. Paper seats and canopies can be added. The proportions can be changed by cutting out some of the squares.
Wooden vehicles are most satisfactory, because they can be made to really go, and boats can be sailed,—which is a boat’s very reason for existing.
For wagons or cars, a soap box or starch box is very satisfactory. The axles should be securely nailed on, absolutely straight. Material for axles and wheels will depend upon the size of the wagon and degree of efficiency desired. For small, crude vehicles, large wooden button molds, wooden spools (possibly sawed in half) may be utilized for wheels, and toothpicks, kindergarten sticks, or twigs for axles. A small nail or small circle of pasteboard, wax, or plasticine slipped on to the axle, each side of the wheel, will keep the latter in place. For more efficient and finished work, wooden disks of a suitable size and with the hole bored through, and the round sticks of a size to fit them, may be purchased from the carpenter shop or planing mill. Or the holes may be bored with the gimlet and filed out to size. The axles are glued into the disks, then glued, nailed, or screwed to the wagon or car body, and the edges filed or sandpapered so the wheels will turn. Or the disks may be nailed at the end of the axle, using a heavy nail with large head. For nicer work, regular wheels and axles may be purchased at the hardware store.
The engine smokestack is made from an empty spool or round box glued on. The cars are coupled together with string, wire, rope, or tiny chains purchased at the hardware store.
The simplest boat is merely a raft with a string tacked on, a spool smokestack, or a sail of paper on a wooden toothpick or skewer, tacked on one end or put into a nail hole. Beyond this is the two or three-decked boat made by fastening small wooden fig boxes or cigar boxes to the four pillars made from slats of a fruit crate, the first deck tacked to a thick block of wood for a keel. This boat will carry real cargoes.
A raft, either doll size or real size, of half-inch board nailed to two parallel joists, can be made by the six-year-old. With the coping saw, a sailboat deck with pointed ends can be made from the whitewood, a block nailed beneath for keel, a sailcloth of muslin hemmed and fastened with cord or small rope to a mast that fits into the hole bored by the gimlet.