Rainy Day Fun — Paper Bag Houses

This invitation to create paper bag houses is so much fun to explore, and super simple to set up! It’s a great after school activity, and perfect for when you need a bit of rainy day fun. My kids loved designing their paper bag houses to create a colorful village, then spent the rest of the afternoon designing roads for toy cars with masking tape! Plenty of imaginative playtime fun!

To set up this cute craft for kids, we used:

• Paper Lunch Bags
• Old Newspaper
• Markers (Crayons, or Colored Pencils would work nicely too)
• Colored Masking Tape
• Various Labels (Color Coding Labels, Neon Labels, etc.)
• Safety Scissors
• Colored Paper
• Stapler

I started by filling each paper lunch bag about half way with crumpled up old newspaper. Then, I rolled up the top and stapled to hold in place. When the kids came home from school, I had the materials ready for them on the kitchen table. Each paper bag was placed on a cookie sheet to help contain any mess. I wish you could have seen their faces when they arrived home — such joy!!

Since we used masking tape and labels to create doors, windows, etc. this was a very low-mess craft! The kids were happy to decorate their houses without any glue or messy paint.

To form the rooftops, I folded a sheet of colored paper in half and cut along the fold. Then folded each half in half once again. I used decorative scissors for a scalloped edge, and the kids thought their houses looked adorable!

Later, they gathered their toy cars and made roads with masking tape to create their own little paper bag town. So much fun!!

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