We love, love, love the idea behind the Walton Arts Center event called “We Built This City” which will take place during two separate event times on Saturday May 19th. It’s genius. All mamas know that video games and fancy electronic toys are all fine and good… but NOTHING beats a good old-fashioned cardboard box. Kids throughout the ages have loved empty boxes and have used their imaginations to turn them 
into all kinds of wonderful things — a secret fort, a tunnel, a magical castle, or a spaceship.
We Built This City is an interactive play space for families which celebrates simplicity and the power of children’s imaginations. A giant public construction site, We Built This City uses thousands and thousands of cardboard boxes and the energy and the ingenuity of kids and families to build a magnificent imagined city on the Walton Arts Center stage in one day.
And here’s the part your kids are really gonna love: When the cardboard city is complete, the kids get to knock it down and trample it into a big pile of rubble. Can you say “FUN”?
Tickets for this family event are $5 each for kids and adults get in FREE to watch or help build.
Please note: There are two event times for this show: 11 a.m. on May 19th or 3 p.m. on May 19th. Although the kids have two hours to build with boxes on the Walton Arts Center stage, you do NOT have to stay the entire two hours and you’re free to come and go anytime during the two-hour event. Fun and flexible — we love that.
We will pick two winners for this giveaway on WEDNESDAY, MAY 16TH at 5 p.m., so be sure to throw your name in the drawing before that time.
HOW TO WIN TICKETS: Thanks to our friends at Walton Arts Center, we’ve got tickets to give away to TWO of the moms reading this post. Each of the winners will get FOUR tickets to the event. To throw your name into our online cardboard box, just click the orange comment button below and tell us what your kids like to do with empty boxes. (My son recently built a cardboard race car out of a giant box. It got great gas mileage.)
You can also enter this giveaway via email by sending your answer to giveaways@nwaMotherlode.com.
SPREAD THE WORD; INCREASE YOUR ODDS: As always, we give extra chances to win to anyone who helps us spread the word about our fun giveaways. Just send an email to your friends/family about this event and be sure to put giveaways@nwaMotherlode.com on the CC line of your note. We’ll give you an extra chance to win for each person you tell.
FOR MORE INFO: To get more info on this event and on all of the events lined up in the Artosphere series presented by Walton Arts Center, click HERE. You can also get more details by calling the Walton Arts Center box office at 479-443-5600. Purchase tickets online by clicking HERE.
PS: Here’s a little video promo of the show we found on YouTube. Looks like so much fun.
play houses, cars, coloring
My kids (when they were younger, they are now teens) used to love to make forts out of boxes. Lots of forts….they would take boxes and boxes together and disappear for a while…haha! Miss those days when boxes would occupy my kids…now it’s ipods, cell phones and video games or they are not interested…
I love Colbie & Gavin both and would totally dig this concert!!
My kids (I have 5! Ages 15, 8, 5, 3 and 2..and yest the little ones can get the oldest (BUBBA) to help them out with their box creations! HA!) love to have bubba tape the boxes together and make playhouses which they color on and play in! Most recent one was a Post Office playhouse that their bubba actually made a mail chute in! HA! Boxes are some of the best fun:)
My son used a cardboard box to make a bumble bee transformer costume! So creative!!
Hide in them… escape to another world in them… boxes can be anything they want them to be, just as long as they have big imaginations!
They like to close eachother up in them. They also like to pretend they are cars and “drive” them to visit friends and family.
Puppet shows!!!
Nathan likes to get inside of them and have his big brother push him around.
Waylon would love this..he and his older sister made robot boxes together and used that really cool duct tape …
My dining room was transformed into a room full of box tunnels. We didn’t have a dining room table for months so that we could accommodate my 2 year old, who loved to play hide and seek in the boxes. It made for fantastic memories.
My 3 youngest kids play house, or store, and sometimes school with their boxes. Haven’t really figured out why we still buy them presents; we should just stock up on cardboard 🙂
Alexis loves to pklay hide and seek. Her most recent box experience was an airplane made out of a carseat box.
HOW FABULOUS!!! We recently bought pool stairs for our above-ground and my son (10 y/o) and 16 m/o daughter have been playing in it all over the backyard… I believe it’s currently a tunnel?
My kids like to chase the dog with boxes. I don’t get it but they think it’s hilarious.