October half term at home: 12 things to do that aren't another craft kit

Half term is a week long and the weather in late October rarely helps. By Wednesday the craft kit somebody bought is finished, the tablet is winning, and there are still three days to go.

The ideas below all come out of ten years of in-person workshops with more than three thousand children. They need almost nothing you don't already own, and they all share one shape: a starting point, never an example to copy.

Why that distinction matters

There is a way of offering an activity that kills it in two minutes: "let's draw a house."

The child instantly understands that a correct house exists — yours — and their job is to get close to it. If it goes badly they stop. If it goes well, they have only followed instructions.

Try this instead: "draw the place you'd hide if you needed to disappear for a day."

There is no right answer. There is nothing to imitate. And nearly always, they start.

Every idea below is written that second way.

With what's already in the house

1. The museum of small things. Five minutes to collect ten objects smaller than their thumb. Then they have to lay it out as a museum, with labels and names they choose.

2. Portrait of a noise. Open the window, listen for thirty seconds, close it. Now: what colour was that noise? What shape? Draw it.

3. Build a house for a guest you've never met. Cardboard, tape, whatever's around. One rule: at the end they have to tell you who lives there and why the house needs to be exactly like that.

4. Clean-rubbish collage. Bottle caps, labels, the pasta box, dry teabag envelopes. One sheet, glue, go.

5. Draw the same thing three times. A glass, say. Once without looking at the paper. Once with the wrong hand. Once in ten seconds flat. Compare them — the best one is almost always the first or the second, and that lands harder than anything you could tell them.

When the weather is the material

6. The rain map. Tape paper behind the window and trace where the drops run. What you end up with is a drawing the weather made.

7. Rained-on watercolour. Very watery paint on thick paper, then put the paper on the sill for ten seconds. It comes back in decided by the water.

8. The sound of the rain in five lines. With an instrument if you have one, saucepans if you don't, and your mouths if you don't have those either. Record it on the phone and play it back — here the phone is a recorder, not a screen.

When there are two of them

9. Relay drawing. One sheet, thirty seconds each, pass it on. Nobody is allowed to tell the other what to do.

10. The mystery object. One builds something out of tin foil inside a box. The other has to work out what it is by touch alone, eyes shut, then draw it as though they had seen it.

11. The gallery of terrible drawings. Everyone makes the worst drawing they are capable of. Then you hang them up and argue seriously about which is worst and why. It is a game, and it does more for the fear of getting it wrong than any amount of encouragement.

12. A story in six squares. Fold a sheet into six. One story, one square per scene, no words. Then they tell it out loud from their own drawings.

The part that matters more than the list

The temptation when they finish is "that's brilliant, well done." It is kind, it says nothing, and children work that out faster than we do.

A question works far better:

• How did you come up with that?
• Which bit do you like most?
• Is there anything you'd do differently?

These treat the child as the author of something rather than a pupil handing in work — and you hear the difference in the answer immediately.

If you'd like to see where children get to when nobody tells them how, the gallery has the finished pieces — awarded for different things: most creative, most unusual use of materials, most colourful.

If you want to try our version

The twelve ideas above are ours and they're free: no sheet, no account, use them however you like.

Barti is a different thing, and it's worth saying how it actually works. Each mission is a one-page illustrated sheet with three steps — find, draw, invent — and a list of materials, always ordinary household things: paper, two flat objects, pencils. So the sheet gives the starting point and the materials. What the child decides is what it becomes: who the characters are, what they say, how it ends.

The sheet also carries a small "get inspired" illustration. It isn't a model to reproduce and there are no steps to imitate — but it's there, and we'd rather say so up front. And when a mission comes as a video, Barti tells the challenge but never shows how to do it: no tutorial, no result to copy.

If your child then wants to upload their work and collect avatars and badges, that runs on a 48-hour window and needs a free account.

Watching the first mission is free and needs no account. Open it on the wettest afternoon of the week and see what happens.