List Price: $6.99
Official URL: www.creativetoyshop.com
Age Range: 3+
Rating:

Looking for a “different” party favor or small toy for your child? How about something that encourages creativity, is durable enough for hours of play, and that can easily be recycled when your child is no longer interested in using it to play?

Calafant makes high quality cardboard toys in the shapes of an: airplane, racecar, horse drawn carriage, dinosaur, steamship, spaceship, house, police car, camper/van, and fire engine. The first part of the play is coloring the toy with markers (6 of which are included) or painting it with paints and decorating it however your child sees fit. The second half of the play is weeks or months of imaginative make believe play.

We test-drove the fire engine, a petite little toy measuring 5″ tall by 9″ long by 4″ across.

QUALITY/CONSTRUCTION

Flattened out, this toy is a single piece of cardboard that measures 30″ long by 11″ wide at its longest parts, and easily folds down to be smaller for storage. It is made out of high quality cardboard that is brown on the inside and that has an easy to color white exterior with black linework that shows the details of the fire engine that it becomes. It folds into shape using tabs and notches to hold itself together. The edges are cut well and not sharp or frayed in any way. The wheels are fixed in place and do not turn, but this doesn’t seem to discourage little ones from “driving” it around and making vroom vroom and siren sounds.

MARKERS

The small toy sets each come with 6 markers. The fire engine came with red, yellow, green, blue, brown, and pink markers, but this may vary from toy to toy.  The markers are all very high quality and you will get quite a bit of use out of them. Any individual marker has more than enough ink to color the entire surface of the toy and have plenty of ink left over.

These markers have ink that is very washable, which will be reassuring to those of us whose children end up getting as much ink on themselves as they do on the cardboard. Or worse, the children that chew on the tip of the marker and color their teeth in. The markers are non-toxic, but obviously not intended to be eaten.

DURABILITY

In order to answer the question of durability, I gave this toy to my 20 month old son for closely supervised play. It has been bitten, kicked around, punched, thrown, and dipped in the dog’s water bowl. Surprisingly after months of use and abuse, this toy is not much worse for the wear. The tabs and wheels have been bent over, but even after many times of being bent and unbent the wheels will still straighten out enough to hold the fire engine upright. One side of the fire engine was battered in and developed a 2″ tear, but simply pulling that side back out and re-inserting the tab into the notch on the roof of the fire truck solved that problem. As for the water damage, the marker-drawn artwork ran a bit but the cardboard itself was undamaged. And the black linework is printed with an indelible ink that was unaffected by the swim.

Similar treatment has broken plastic and wooden toys, so overall this toy is much more durable than I would have expected a cardboard toy to be! Very impressive. Younger children can play with this toy as my son did but you need to make sure to supervise closely as this toy really is not suitable for children under 3 due to the danger of tearing off and swallowing small parts.

PACKAGING & DISTRIBUTION

This toy is made in China for German-based Calafant, and imported into the United States by mom-entrepreneur Martina McConnon of Philadelphia. This toy comes sealed in a thin plastic bag with a large full-color instruction sheet that shows the instructions for each of the entire line of the “small” cardboard toys.

The bottom of toy is printed with “Available at www.creativetoyshop.com” which serves as a convenient reminder of where you bought the toy so that you can go back and buy more.

BOTTOM LINE

These little toys are a great idea, and surprisingly fun to decorate and play with. They bring a needed taste of simplicity back into a world where everything is complex and expensive.