Square Deal! What To Do With A Box by Jane Yolen

A BOX! A BOX
IS A WONDER
INDEED.THE ONLY
SUCH MAGIC
THAT YOU'LL
EVER NEED.

A plain, brown cardboard box is a tabula rasa, a blank slate upon which the child's mind can draw anything that can be imagined.

It can be turned upside down to become a tea party table. It can be a reading nook, a private window seat to snuggle with a book. A box can be a library, a door to open with its magic key.

Or that box can take you away, far away from your usual day.

YOU CAN DRIVE IN THAT BOX ALL AROUND A DIRT TRACK.

YOU CAN SAIL IN THAT BOX OFF TO PARIS AND BACK.

Kids can decorate those boxes with crayons or paints, turning them into a a backdrop for a play or an forest exploration adventure. A box can be whatever you see, whatever you make of it.

Maybe a box isn't the only incentive to fire up the imagination, but even babies can see the fun involved in crawling inside and playing hide-and-seek long before they ever hear of that game. Noted author of the best-selling The Bear Books, begun with Bear Snores On (The Bear Books), Jane Yolen's newest rhyming book,  What To Do With a Box (Creative Education, 2016), is impelled along by her genial anapestic pentameter verse, and illustrator Chris Sheban provides multiple inventive uses of cardboard media to add to the fun, introducing just a few of the ways a box can be used as an all-purpose toy. In their starred review, Kirkus adds, "Intuitive, inspired executions of art and verse perfectly capture the unending fun of time spent inside a box."

Absolutely pair this one with Antoinette Portis' brilliant Not a Box. (see my review here)