Situation · 5pm, nothing prepared · 5 activities
Start Right Now, No Preparation
Five activities with nothing to cut, print or make, starting with one that needs no objects at all.
If your hands are full, the answer is three instructions in one breath. You say three things, in order, and your child goes and does all three. Nothing at all to fetch, nothing to make, three to five minutes, and it works from the cooker. That is the one to pick if you only read one line on this page.
The other four each need one object you already own. A clothes peg and a bowl: Clothespin Pinching, two to four years old, and you can walk away from it. Kitchen tongs, cotton wool and an ice cube tray: Tongs and Ice Tray Transfer, same age, same walking away. A drinking straw and a ping pong ball: the blow race, noisy, funny, over in minutes. A square of paper: paper folding, for five and up, and it is the one that will run twenty minutes.
When these pages say the setup is none, they mean none. There is no printing, no template and no evening of cutting hiding behind any of the five, which is not true of everything in the library and is the reason this shelf exists.
If you do get a quiet evening, the things worth making once are gathered under make it yourself, and they are the ones that then run for months.
The five
Ordered by the age each suits best. The setup column reads none or nearly none on all five; the play column is what actually varies, from three minutes to twenty.
- 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
- Kitchen Tongs and Ice Tray Transfer Your child picks up a cotton wool ball with kitchen tongs, carries it across the table and drops it into an ice cube tray, twelve cups in a row. no setup · 5 to 10 min · household only
- Straw Blow Ping Pong Race Your child blows a ping pong ball across the table through a straw, and races it to a strip of tape at the far end. no setup · under 5 min · household only
- 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
- 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
All five are dry and tidy, and four of them can be handed over and left.