Material shelf · markers, pencils and paint chips · 2 activities
Basic Art Supplies
The two where the art drawer supplies the working parts: a permanent marker that stays on a cardboard egg box, and pom-poms and a paint palette standing in for chickpeas and an ice tray.
Four things cover nearly everything on this site. A permanent marker, because it writes on a cardboard egg box and keeps, where a biro fades and a marker on polystyrene or clear plastic rubs off within a week. A thick felt tip, because a thick line reads from the other side of the table and a fine pencil drawing disappears at arm's length. A pencil with a rubber, because a plan is a thing that gets changed and a child who cannot undo a line stops redrawing. And three or four felt tips in real colours for matching, since a card with the colour names written on it asks a three year old to read instead.
Paint chips are the best free thing in a hardware shop. Take two identical strips of each colour: one gets cut into squares to be graded, the other stays whole as the answer, so a child can check herself without asking anybody. Pick a strip with four or five shades on it rather than a two-shade one. If there is no hardware shop in the week ahead, load a brush once with watery paint and drag it along a strip of card without reloading, so it fades along its length, then cut it into squares. One brushful gives a smoother run of shades than mixing five pots does.
The craft-drawer version of a transfer tray is worth knowing because it changes the difficulty. Fifteen millimetre pom-poms squash slightly, so a grip that is a few millimetres off still holds them, and a paint palette has shallow wells that tweezers can get out of. Dried chickpeas in bottle caps are the hard end of the same activity. Soft and wide first, small and deep later.
A strip of clear packing tape over the face of anything paper makes it survive months of handling. Untaped paint chips go soft at the corners after a fortnight of three year old fingers.
The two
Ordered by the age they suit best. Each line gives the setup time, the play time and whether anything has to be bought.
- 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
- 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
Both of these work with what is already in the drawer, and both take about five minutes to put together.
Seven more where a pen does the work
These are filed under card, beads or tape, but in every one of them the drawing is the working part: the faces, the sequence pictures, the bead pattern, the letters above the slots, the red and blue clock rings, the plan on squared paper. None of them needs any skill at drawing. Circles, two dots and a line for the mouth is the entire artwork on the feelings cards, and stick figures beat a leaflet photograph as often as not.
- Cardboard Post Office and Sound Drop Your child holds a picture card, says the sound its word starts with, and posts it through the slot marked with that letter. 15 min, once · 10 to 20 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
- Mirror Feelings Copycat Your child pulls the face on the card, sees it in the mirror next to yours, and hears you name the feeling that goes with it. 2 min · under 5 min · cards you draw
- 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
- 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
- Clock Face and Hands Match Your child sets the hands on a paper clock to match a card, and the card says what happens at that time in his own day. 15 min, once · 10 to 20 min · household only
- Maze Blueprint Mapping Your child tapes a maze onto the floor and then draws it on paper as a plan, or draws the plan first and builds to it. 2 min · 20 min or more · household only