The Kitchen
Table Ten
Ten things to make with your three to six year old using what is already in your house. And, more importantly, exactly what to say while they do it.
Free to read, nothing to sign up for. Everything on the list is a few dollars or already in your kitchen.
Read this first
Four rules, and they matter more than the ten
If you only keep one part of this page, keep this one.
A tray of nine things looks generous and reads as a decision a three year old cannot make yet. One pot of paint and one odd tool beats a craft trolley every single time.
The moment a child can see what it is supposed to look like, the job changes from having an idea to matching yours. Those are different skills and only one of them is worth their afternoon.
No questions, no suggestions, no help unless they ask. This is the hardest rule on the page and it is the one that changes the most.
Not beautiful. Not clever. Not well done. What you say in the ten seconds after they hand it over is what they keep.
Instead of “what is it?” say “tell me about this one.”
Instead of “that’s beautiful” say “you used so much blue here.”
Instead of “yes you can” say “you can’t do it yet.”
The list
One box, instead of ten kits
Everything in the ten comes out of this box, or out of your kitchen. Buy it once and it lasts the whole holidays.
Masking tape
Packing tape
A glue stick
PVA or school glue
Cotton buds
Pipe cleaners
Thick paper or a drawing pad
A fork
An ice tray and teaspoons
Table salt
Dish soap and a straw
Dry pasta, buttons, bottle lids
The recycling bin
A cereal box, opened flat
Any cheap poster or tempera paint in red, yellow, blue, black and white. Those five make everything. A set of twenty colours looks better in the cupboard and teaches a child less, because mixing is where the thinking happens.
What I would not buy. Anything with a finished picture on the front. A kit has a right answer printed on the box, and a child can tell within about four seconds whether theirs is going to look like it. That is usually the moment it gets put down, and it is not boredom. It is comparison.
01
Fork painting
A fork. Paint. Paper.
One colour. One fork. That is the whole setup.
Dip it, drag it sideways, and it leaves four lines in one movement. Thick paint holds the ridges, watery paint will not.
The fork only goes sideways.
You found a different way to use it.
Say the first one once, before anyone touches anything.
What it is building. Turning the wrist instead of swinging the whole arm. That rotation is the exact movement a pencil needs later, and a brush is too hard to ask for it with.
02
The sticky wall
Packing tape. A cupboard door or a window. Torn up paper, tissue, leaves, foil.
Tape a long loop sticky side out at their height. Put the scraps in a bowl underneath.
They press things on, pull them off, move them around. It stays up for days and they keep coming back to it.
You can put anything on there.
Then nothing at all. This one does not need you.
What it is building. Working upright builds the shoulder, and handwriting starts at the shoulder long before it reaches the fingers. This is the most useful thing on the list if you are worried about school.
03
Ice cube painting
An ice tray. Watered down paint or food colouring. Teaspoons. Thick paper.
Fill the tray the night before. A teaspoon standing in each one makes a handle.
They paint with it as it melts and the colour keeps changing on them. It gets slippery, it drips, it will not behave.
It is doing something different now. What happened?
That is what ice does.
The second one is for when it goes everywhere, which it will.
What it is building. Staying with something that will not do what you want. That is self regulation, it is completely trainable, and this is one of the few activities that teaches it without anybody getting upset.
04
Bubble painting
Dish soap. Paint. A straw. A cup. Paper.
Paint, a squeeze of soap, a splash of water in the cup. Mix.
They blow until the bubbles dome over the rim, then press the paper on top. It prints as a cluster of circles and no two come out the same.
Blow, do not suck.
Look what the bubbles left behind.
Practise once with plain water first, every single time.
What it is building. Breath control, which is the same machinery underneath calming down. And a first proper lesson in cause and effect they can run themselves.
05
Salt drawing
PVA or school glue. Table salt. Watercolour. A brush. Thick paper, or a cereal box opened out.
Put the glue, the salt in a cup, and one brush on the table.
They draw with the glue, tip salt over the whole thing, and shake the loose salt off. Then they touch a loaded brush to the salt line and the colour runs along it on its own.
The good bit does not happen straight away.
Watch where it goes.
Say the first before, the second after. Nothing happens for about ninety seconds and then it all happens at once.
What it is building. Waiting. The interesting part only arrives after the boring part, and they find that out for themselves rather than being told.
06
Dot painting
Cotton buds. Two or three colours. Paper.
A bud per colour. Nothing drawn on the page first.
Dots. That is it. They fill the page, they make lines of them, they do a big one surrounded by small ones.
There is an artist called Yayoi Kusama who has made dots her whole life.
You put these ones very close together.
What it is building. A cotton bud can only be held one way, between the thumb and two fingers, so it builds the pincer grip without anybody mentioning a pencil.
07
Torn paper
Coloured paper, magazines, junk mail. A glue stick. One big sheet.
No scissors. That is the point.
They tear, then arrange, then stick. Matisse did exactly this when he was too unwell to paint standing up, and he called it drawing with scissors.
You are allowed to move them around before you stick anything.
Why did you put that one there?
What it is building. Tearing is a two hand job. One hand holds while the other pulls in the opposite direction, and that is bilateral coordination, which is the thing a child needs before cutting makes any sense.
08
The recycling build
Whatever is in the recycling. Masking tape. That is genuinely all.
Tip the bin out on the table. Do not sort it for them.
Ask what they want to make before they touch anything. Then let them fail at sticking a tube to a box for a while before you offer anything.
What are you going to make?
That is the hard bit. What else could hold it up?
The first one before, not during. The second when it falls over.
What it is building. Deciding first and then building. That is planning, and it is the hardest thing we teach three year olds, because the instinct is to grab and see.
09
Playdough and the odds drawer
Playdough. Dry pasta, buttons, bottle lids, beads.
No cutters and no rolling pin. Just the dough and a handful of small things.
They push things in, pull them out, roll, squash, and start again.
Almost nothing.
This is the quietest, longest concentration you will get all week, and the fastest way to end it is a question.
What it is building. Pushing small objects into resistant dough builds the exact grip a pencil needs, and the squashing builds the hand strength underneath it.
10
Outside, with nothing
Nothing at all. A garden, a park, a footpath.
There is no setup. That is why it is on the list.
Collect, then arrange on the ground. Leaves in order of size. Stones in a spiral. Photograph it and let the real one blow away.
We are not taking it home. We will take a picture of it.
What order are you putting them in?
Say the first at the start, never at pack away.
What it is building. Composition, sorting and sequencing, which is early maths wearing a different coat. And the first experience of making something that is not meant to last.
When it goes wrong
All five of these will happen
None of them mean it is not working.
“I can’t do it.”
Do not say yes you can. They have told you what they believe and you have told them they are wrong about themselves. Say “you can’t do it yet”, then draw something badly yourself and be delighted about it.
They rip it up.
They have a picture in their head and no plan for the gap between that and the page. Name the hard part before they meet it next time: “this bit is tricky for everybody.”
They finish in four minutes.
You gave them the finished idea. Take the sample away and there is no finish line.
They will not start at all.
Somebody, at some point, corrected them. Put it out and say nothing for ten minutes. Three weeks of that undoes most of it.
They ask you to draw it.
Never draw for a child. Ask what the hardest bit is and start there, on their paper, with their hand.
Want it as a printable?
One page per activity, for the fridge or the kitchen drawer. I will send the next guide when it is ready too.
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If this was useful
You have the ten. The teaching is the other half.
Every Say this line on this page came out of The Mini Ivy Method. There are about forty more of them, plus the order to teach in and what to say when it goes wrong. It is written for educators, and there is a whole section in it for parents doing this at one table with one child.
See The Mini Ivy Method
Co-Founder, Mini Ivy Art Studio. I studied teaching at Flinders University and spent about eight years teaching reception to year two before starting Mini Ivy. We run structured creative development sessions for three to six year olds, five days a week, at our studio in Torrensville, Adelaide. Everything here is what we actually do on those days, not theory.