Mini Airplane Toys in an Altoid Tin

Wow!  Guy!  I  haven't blogged in two years!  Yikes!  In fact, my blogs (I have 3) have been on the back burner basically since the Pandemic started.  We've still traveled as a family, but I've just felt no motivation to get them blogged.  I'm planning for roll out some new posts in the next few months as we get ready for our biggest road trip yet!

A NOTE ABOUT FREE PRINTABLES:

Google decided to completely mess up my blog this past fall by changing all the links to my printables and destroying all my hard work.  I couldn't gather the mental energy to fix them.  I'm sorry if you've come by this blog looking for all the fun travel printables I've made and got frustrated with the system.  I hope to work on them soon and clear up all the messes.  I also have some NEW printables nearly ready for publishing, so come back and visit to grab those!

My kids love all things tiny!  Ever since they were pretty small, I have been making them small world play sets and activities in Altoid Tins.  My husband loves to snack on them during our road trips, so we always have an abundance of tins in the house (you can also buy plain tins on Amazon).  I had each kid wipe out their Altoid tin with a baby wipe, and they were ready for crafting!

For this craft, we used a hot glue gun to affix the felt pieces to the tin (you can see the mess from them in the tins- but it's not a big deal because the kids made them and are happy).  To get the right size of felt of the bottom of the tin, place the tin on your felt and trace around it with a pen.  Then, cut the rectangle out just inside the pen line and glue it in place.

The boys each had a mini airplane, so they wanted to make runways.  A simple strip of black felt makes it easy to lay some fake blacktop.  One boy added some blue shapes to be water.  Green mini pom poms could also be added to the tin for bushes or trees.  Other kids' craft items could be used for decorating the small worlds, like beads, foam shapes, magnetic things, or whatever you and your child can imagine.

The top airplane in the picture is a 3D model that the boys created and printed with my husband.  The bottom one is from the Driven mini toy series (if you can't find those, there are many other miniature toy brands on the market).  My kids love all the variety of vehicles in the collection.  Here's a picture of them playing with them at the beach recently.

My kids loved using the mini track pieces to create lots of configurations and did plenty of pretend play.  The pieces were durable enough to be played with on the patio of our hotel room or wherever the kids wanted to build.  The loved the tiny vehicles, too.  There's so much variety!  The track set is now part of our family road trip and adventures bin of activities.  They're looking forward to using them while we're camping, too.

There are lots of other toys you can add to the Altoid tins to make a small world for playtime.  My daughter chose to use the Safari Ltd Good Luck Minis pack with the Safari animals for an African inspired play set.  You can also find farm, dragon, rainforest, and ocean animals for different habitats.

((( Click Here for More Altoid Tin Ideas )))