Situation · a tin, a bag and a long wait · 13 activities
Travel and Waiting Rooms
Thirteen activities small enough to pack and self-contained enough to survive a waiting room floor.
Pack this and you are done in five minutes: a tin with a lid, a lace and a handful of beads, a stack of picture cards and a few squares of paper. That covers Pattern Card Bead Lacing, Story Sequence Cards and paper folding, which between them run from three years old to eight.
The thing that decides whether an activity travels is not its size, it is what happens when a piece drops. Beads on a lace stay on the lace. Cards come back off a floor. Loose chickpeas under a seat in a train do not. So the ones to pick are the ones where the pieces are captured: threaded, sewn onto a card, or pushed into a hole and left there.
Match it to the kind of waiting. A waiting room has a table and no time limit, so the counting grid or the sewing card both work. A car on a winding road wants nothing fiddly, so it is the instruction game, played out loud with no objects at all. A plane tray is exactly the size of a square of paper, which is why folding is the best thing on this shelf for a five to eight year old.
The waiting itself is a thing a child gets better at, and our guide to patience and waiting is about that rather than about filling the time.
The thirteen
Ordered by the age each one suits best. Read the materials column with a bag in mind: the shorter the list, the better it travels.
- Clothespin Pinching Your child squeezes a wooden clothes peg open and clips it onto the rim of a bowl, and then does it forty more times. no setup · 5 to 10 min · household only
- Peg and Hole Matching Your child picks up a fat peg, lines it up over a hole that just fits it, and pushes it home. none once made · 5 to 10 min · household only
- Posting and Slotting Your child pushes a plastic lid through a slot cut in a tub, hears it land, and then takes the tub lid off and finds it again. 2 min · 5 to 10 min · household only
- Color Shade Grading Your child lays a handful of squares in a line, darkest at one end and palest at the other. 2 min · 5 to 10 min · household only
- Nuts and Bolts Screwing Your child holds a bolt still in one hand and winds a nut all the way down it with the other, and then winds it off again. no setup · 5 to 10 min · five pairs, or the jar shelf
- Pattern Card Bead Lacing Your child looks at a row of beads drawn on a card and threads the same order onto a lace, one bead at a time. 2 min · 10 to 20 min · beads, a lace, a drawn card
- Three-Step Instruction Hunt You give three instructions in one breath, and your child goes and does all three, in order, without help. no setup · 3 to 5 min · nothing at all
- Tweezer Transfer Challenge Your child lifts dried chickpeas one at a time with a pair of tweezers and puts each one into its own small well. 2 min · 5 to 10 min · household only
- Button Sewing Card Your child sews real buttons onto a punched card with a shoelace, up through one hole and down through the other, until the card is covered in buttons. 15 min, once · 10 to 20 min · household only
- Egg Carton Counting Grid Your child reads the number written in the bottom of an egg carton cup and drops in exactly that many beans, one at a time, twelve cups in a row. 15 min, once · 10 to 20 min · household only
- Story Sequence Cards Your child puts four or five cards into the order the thing actually happened, and then tells you the story they make. 2 min · 5 to 10 min · household only
- Paper Folding Precision Challenge Your child folds a square of paper corner to corner, presses the crease with a thumbnail, and finds out four folds later whether the first one was straight. no setup · 10 to 20 min · household only
- Cardboard Loom Yarn Weaving Your child weaves a small square of cloth on a loom cut from a cereal box, over four or five sittings, and it takes as long as it takes. 15 min, once · 20 min or more · household only
Bring a lid. A biscuit tin or a zip bag is the difference between packing away in ten seconds and crawling under the seats.