Make: A Scrap Wood and Dowel DIY Play Board

We are putting our safety goggles on and pulling out the power tools today! Admittedly, this DIY is one of my more random ideas, but while trying to use up some spare wood, I kind of stumbled upon it, and – honestly – I have never had more fun. What is this? We’re calling it a Thingamaboard, and it’s pretty much anything you want it to be!

From a jungle in the Amazon, to ring toss, to a mountain campsite, this open-ended play board of moveable pegs can adapt to anything imaginable! Make a tiny puppet stage with some scrap fabric and a piece of twine. Add some screws, straws, small pulleys, twine, and other loose parts to create a small simple-machine playground for Legos. 

One of my favorite toys growing up was a Montessori knobless cylinder ladder (do you know the kind? Brightly colored wooden cylinders with a board each peg sits in). It’s a fantastic open-ended learning tool for toddlers, but it was so simple and versatile, it became an accessory for imaginary play as we got older too. It was the cash register at our “store,” the student file holder when we played school, even a brutalist Lego playground. It was also the inspiration for this little project and is one of the few toddler toys I *still* have today.

Much like that simple learning toy, this play board only requires a few basic materials and is so incredibly versatile. Whether your kids use theirs for small world setups, to build simple games and experiment with engineering, or create something completely unique, we’d love to see how yours is used!

Love reusing your scrap wood? We have simple recycled wood projects for everyone! Little (or big!) artists might enjoy our scrap wood process art sculptures. And tiny techies with crafty caretakers will LOVE these DIY wooden writeable tablets or laptops for pretend play.

To make your own scrap wood and dowel play board you’ll need:

Note: We prefer to shop locally or use what we have at home, but this list contains Woodpeckers Crafts, Etsy, Blick Art Materials, and/or Amazon affiliate links for reference. As Amazon Associates, we make a small commission on qualifying purchases.*

So, you’re probably going to make this, and sit down with your kids, and frankly, it’s going to look a little “meh” – but add just the teensiest bit of imagination and the possibilities for playing with this are ENDLESS! For instance, with just a few added elements from around the house, it can become…

Camping small world play…

To make our mini campsite play setup, we took out quite a few of the dowels to make room for the details. We strung a string through a couple of through the tallest of them, folding small paper triangles around it to create a camp-inspired bunting.

After gathering a few natural supplies from the backyard, we made a leafy open area and pushed a couple of tree clippings and twigs into dowel holes. These elements became our campsite foliage and a twig-and-string structure to hold up our folded paper tent.

Small scrap pieces of felt and flannel were cut up, laid out, rolled, and tied to make tiny camping blankets and snug little sleeping bags.

This little stage sets the scene for an afternoon of fantastic small world play. Even just putting the pieces together to build our camp environment was an exercise in independent creative learning and imaginative storytelling.

A play jungle paradise for little monkeys…

To make a few quick palm trees, we cut a wide strip of tissue paper, cut some vertical lines into the paper, then wrapped around the tops of our widest dowel rods and taped. In a bag of old cake decorating supplies, I found monkey cake toppers, that you could recreate with some felt, paper, and pom-poms.

Construction paper scraps were cut up to create rivers and ponds that attract all kinds of jungle animals!

A game of ring toss…

Honestly, the more we played with our Thingamaboard, the more ideas we had for future setups. A few of the things we haven’t yet put together, but are on our list are:

• A finger puppet theater
• A pipe cleaner sculpture
• A construction site with ropes and pulleys for our legos

I absolutely love experimenting with scrap wood! If you do too, be sure to see how I turned a few old wood scraps into a simple but epic mini mid-century modern DIY dollhouse (no special woodworking tools required!).

For kids (and adults!) who prefer more physical play, visit our upcycled scrap wood balance board DIY. I still use this every day, and it’s of barley & birch’s most popular posts EVER!