The Surprise Drawing

When you find yourself with young people wondering what to do create a surprise drawing. Why is it a surprise? Because you won't know what it is until your child completes it and then applies his or her imagination to what you see!

Huh? Take a piece of paper. Draw squiggly lines all over the page. Sometimes the lines cross making interesing little shapes and sometimes you have bigger weird shapes of all kinds.

Next randomly make dots inside the different shape--here and there, not everywhere. You might want to use colored pencils making dots of different colors inside different spaces.

Now hand the paper to your child with a pencil (or colored pencils) and instruct him or her to color in only the spaces where you marked a dot. If using colored pencils you can ask them to match the color to the color of the dot.

Once all dotted spaces are colored in, see what the picture actually is. In most cases your child will need to think up--use imagination--to tell you what he or she has drawn.

You can even take that process a step further by making up a story to go along with the picture.