How to Make a Tent Room

It's a cold, cloudy day, and you and your children have nothing to do. You don't want them wasting away watching television for hours on end. It's time to get creative and find an activity for the whole family. Building a tent room is a great way to get your children excited and involved and provide something more constructive to do with the day. While specific design is really up for interpretation, here's some ideas to get you started.

Instructions

1

Gather supplies. Primarily, you'll need a bunch of sheets. Larger king or queen top sheets will work best.

2

Designate a room in the home where you'll be creating your tent room. The idea is to create a large tent that fills the entire room, so make sure it's not a room that you need for other purposes. The best idea is to do it in a child's bedroom. A basement or play room would also work well. The room should have some furniture in it, however---you'll be putting it to use. If you have two children that share a room, this will work even better as beds are a big help in tent building.

3

With the help of your children, begin conceptualizing your tent and move furniture around the room to serve as supports. Any furniture---desks, chairs, tables, beds, shelves---is fair game, so long as it is sturdy and won't tip over.

4

Drape the sheets over and between the pieces of furniture to form the roof of your tent. Use additional sheets inside to divide the tent into rooms. You can use desk drawers or windows closed onto the edges of the sheets to keep them securely anchored, or use soft anchors such as pillows to hold the sheets on top of beds. If needed, use a nail or tack to pin a corner of the sheet to the wall. You could also put a bobby pin onto the sheet and run some string through it to tie it to table legs or other available supports. How you secure it will really depend upon what furniture you have available and how your tent is arranged.

5

To make the tent, begin at the entrance of the room and put a small table right inside the doorway. Place a sheet on top of the table, so that it covers the three sides jutting out from the door frame, and wedge the sheet between the table and the door frame to keep it from falling off. Now, in order to get into your "tent room," your children will need to crawl under the table and directly into the tent. If you don't have an appropriate table, use tacks or nails to secure a sheet to the door frame and make an entrance.

6

Incorporate existing spaces into the tent. For instance, a bed can serve as a secret passage into the tent when your child crawls underneath it. A closet can serve as a secret room if you connect the tent to it.

7

If the tent sags in places, use common household items like broomsticks, mop poles or even vacuum handles to prop it up.

8

Let your children enjoy. Building the tent is half the fun, and playing in it for the rest of the day (or days) is the other half!