Skill shelf · watching one thing for weeks · 1 activity

Nature and Close Observation

One long activity: a bean out of the kitchen cupboard grown against glass, then watched, watered and measured every morning for a fortnight or more.

Close observation needs something worth coming back to, and this one runs for weeks at five minutes a morning. The beans go between kitchen paper and the glass, so the white root shows on day three or four and the shoot on day six or eight. That visibility is the whole difference between this and a bean in a pot of soil, where as far as a child can tell nothing happens for a week.

Cress goes in on the same morning and is up by day two, so the first week has something in it. The jar stands on a sill she walks past on the way to breakfast rather than a shelf she has to remember. The watering is handed over completely, including the mornings it gets forgotten, because a bean that droops on Thursday and comes back on Friday makes the schedule real in a way no reminder does.

You know it is working when she notices the shoot leaning towards the window and turns the jar round to see what happens. That is the step across into changing one thing on purpose, and it usually arrives as her own question rather than yours.

The one here

The line gives the age it suits, what the setup takes and how long a morning runs.

• Plant Care and Growth Measuring Your child grows a bean from a dried one in the cupboard, waters it on a schedule that is hers, and cuts a paper strip to its height every morning. 2 min · 5 min a day, for weeks · household only

Everything it needs is in the kitchen already: dried beans, a jam jar, kitchen paper and a strip of card.

Four more about looking closely

None of these involves a living thing, so they are filed under other skills, but each one turns on noticing a difference small enough to miss: five shades of one colour laid darkest to palest, ten pots that look identical and are not, a shadow that belongs to one outline, a continent shaped so it drops into one place and nowhere else.

• 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
• Shape Shadow Match Your child stands a solid shape in a beam of light and works out which of the outlines traced on the paper its shadow belongs to. 2 min · 10 to 20 min · household only
• Weighted Pod Sorting Your child picks up two pots that look exactly alike, decides which one is heavier, and keeps going until all ten are in pairs. 15 min, once · 5 to 10 min · household only
• Continent Map Puzzle Your child lifts each continent out of a wooden map by its knob and puts it back where it came from. 1 min · 10 to 20 min · has to be bought

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