A kind of rough-textured, ultra-heavy, almost
cardboardish paper used by
very small children in
arts and crafts. Probably the most important material for said purposes after
pipe cleaners. Construction paper is
cheap and usually strongly
colored, usually darkly.
In retrospect, the usage of construction paper for most of the things it was used for seems difficult to justify; it wasn't very good for drawing on. Crayon is hard to move across it, and pencil and pen drawn onto it come out almost so washed out on the paper as to be invisible-- which was just as well, because any attempts to draw on construction paper with pen or pencil were doomed to failure because the rough texture would cause your hand to jitter all over the place. Drawing a straight line in pencil on construction paper is damn near impossible.
But, of course, drawing on it was missing the point, since what construction paper was best for was works made by taking glue and scissors, cutting the construction paper up into shapes, and arranging the shapes into artwork.. which is, of course, the method used by the creators of South Park! (The early two "The Spirit of Christmas" films were literally done solely with construction paper and stop-motion animation. All of the television episodes and the movie were created with state of the art 3d animation software.. but said software is working entirely off of scans of construction paper.)