This is a totally easy, no artistic ability needed play idea! All you need is a long roll of paper (you can get this at any art or craft supply store), some coloured pencils or crayons and an assortment of toy cars and other toys you probably already have.
All we did was roll out some paper and draw the basic road grid first. We collected some toy cars, figures, blocks and road signs to use as props. Then we filled in the details of our little paper city! Here are a few more things we like to include.
Figures and, of course, cars!
Most kids love collecting cars and figures, so you've probably got a few to choose from. We like incorporating people (or people like animal figures!) into our play city so it's not all about the car! Here we've made sure to include a cross walk which is a wonderful way to talk to your kids about road safety as a pedestrian. It's also pretty sweet to watch your kiddo carefully stop their car so they don't hurt anyone.
Include some favourite places
Draw out some favourite places your kiddo loves to go in their neighbourhood. Our son loves going to coffee shops (did someone say muffin?) and he knows several of the farms at the farmers market by name. So we made sure those spots were included in our paper city. I drew a picture as well as wrote out the name so my son would know which square was what since he can't read much yet. I'm proof you don't need much artistic skill to create something your kid will love to play with! PS - our son is so obsessed with the farmers market we had to bring home this fruit wagon.
Use blocks, play dough "trees" and pieces of felt
We used some blocks to create little houses to include in our city. We also love the Grimm's little houses block set for this activity. Use blue paper or blue felt to create park ponds or rivers to give some more variety to your city. And if you'd like some greenery in your park, take little mounds of play dough and use it to hold up small branches, leaves or small pieces of house plants to create your very own trees.
Road signs and rainbows
If you have them, road signs add a fun dose of realism and can be perfect talking points for road safety. But don't fret if you don't have them on hand - you can always draw some right on the paper or tape a DIY stop sign to a building block.
And we love using our Grimm's wooden rainbows to make quick and easy bridges to span our paper rivers.
This was such a fun activity, we left it out on our living room floor for days to play with. When we were done, we just rolled it away to play with another day.