Creative Activities for Kids at Home

Open-ended making, where the outcome is genuinely unknown at the start. That single condition separates these from kits, which produce a result but very little creative thinking.

Building and making

Junk modelling. A box of packaging, tape, glue, scissors. No brief, or a very loose one. The most reliably productive creative activity there is and it costs nothing.

Den building. Indoors with sheets and furniture, outdoors with anything. Engineering plus territory plus negotiation.

Small worlds. A tray of sand, soil or water with a few figures and natural materials. Children build narrative into these for hours.

Marble runs from cardboard tubes. Iteration made visible: it works or the marble stops.

Story and performance

Make a book. Fold, staple, fill. Children take a bound object far more seriously than loose paper.

Puppet shows, with socks or paper or nothing. The script matters less than the performing.

A newspaper for the household, with interviews. Older children take this surprisingly seriously.

Radio play, recorded on a phone, with sound effects made from household objects. The sound effects are the fun.

Sound and movement

Instruments from containers filled with different things, then working out which sounds are which.

Making up a song about something dull, which is funnier and easier than making up a song about something important.

Choreographing something to a piece of music and teaching it to somebody.

Cooking as creative work

Inventing rather than following. Give them a limited set of ingredients and let them decide. Some of it will be inedible, which is part of it and should not be commented on beyond a straight face.

The conditions that matter more than the list

Materials available without asking. If they have to request the tape, spontaneous making does not happen.

Mess permitted somewhere. The main constraint in most houses is not imagination but the floor.

Work left up between sessions. Something dismantled every evening never becomes elaborate.

Nobody improving it. Not the proportions, not the structure, not the plan. This is the hard one.

What to say afterwards

Ask about the making rather than judging the made. What was the hard bit. What did you try first. What would you do differently.

Those questions treat the child as the author, which is the entire point of the activity.