Why prompts work for kids

A blank page asks a child "what should I draw?" and that question is too big — so they draw nothing, or they draw the same sun in the same corner for the tenth time. A prompt replaces the big question with a small one, and the small one is easy enough that the crayon starts moving before the doubt wakes up.

Use these one at a time, in any order, under twenty minutes each. That limit is the point: a prompt that becomes a project stops being a prompt. And when a drawing comes out well, keep it — the best ones can become a personalized storybook.

For a rainy afternoon

  • Prompt 01 — Draw the first thing you saw this morning. Before breakfast, before the phone: open the book, draw the first thing your eyes found. One line if you can.
  • Prompt 02 — Draw your pet as a superhero. Cape, mask, and one superpower. Bonus points if the superpower is "naps."
  • Prompt 03 — Draw your house, but bigger. Same house, twice as tall, with a slide instead of stairs.
  • Prompt 04 — Draw your breakfast as a monster. The cereal bowl has teeth now. What does it say?

For the animal lovers

  • Prompt 05 — A dragon with a job. Your dragon is a postman, a teacher, or a chef. Draw the uniform.
  • Prompt 06 — The fox who lives under the bed. What does his room look like? Draw it.
  • Prompt 07 — A fish that can fly. Wings, clouds, and one very surprised bird.
  • Prompt 08 — Your pet, drawn from memory, in five minutes. Wrong details are better than right ones here. Memory is the subject.

For the storytellers

  • Prompt 09 — One star, one moon, one mistake. A classic for a reason. The mistake is the star of the page.
  • Prompt 10 — Draw your day as a map. Doors, corners, and crossings instead of buildings. Your day is a route, not a place.
  • Prompt 11 — A small creature, one body part at a time. Head on page one. Body on page two. They will not match. They never do, and that is the charm.
  • Prompt 12 — Draw a conversation. Two speech bubbles, and in each one, a tiny picture of what each person was actually thinking.

For the brave ones

  • Prompt 13 — One line, no lifting the crayon. Sixty seconds. When the line dies, the day is done.
  • Prompt 14 — Draw your room with the lights off. Close your eyes and draw what you feel. It will be abstract. It will be true.
  • Prompt 15 — Draw your signature badly, on purpose, for a full page. Signatures are tiny sketches of your ego. Defacing them is liberating.
  • Prompt 16 — Three dots, three lines, three curves. Make one picture from them. Constraint is a kindness.

For the whole family

  • Prompt 17 — Everyone draws the same thing. A dragon, a house, a car. Compare the results — no two will match, and that is the lesson.
  • Prompt 18 — Draw the thing you avoid thinking about. Not literally. The shape of it. Most kids draw a locked door.
  • Prompt 19 — Your kitchen in ten years. Same kettle, different light. Future-tense drawing is a surprisingly good way to decide what you want.
  • Prompt 20 — One page for each month of last year. Twelve tiny pages, twelve tiny yous. You can draw them in one weekend.

For the keepers

  • Prompt 21 — Draw the best thing that happened this week. Not the biggest thing. The best one.
  • Prompt 22 — Draw a gift for someone who is not here. They will see it. That is what drawings are for — messages to people who are away.
  • Prompt 23 — Draw the first page of your sketchbook again, today. Open to your first page, look at that first drawing, and draw it again. Then draw it again next year.
  • Prompt 24 — Draw your dragon's next adventure. Where does it go tomorrow? That drawing is the first page of the next book.
The prompt is not the drawing. The prompt is the door; the drawing is the walk.

How to run a prompt routine

Pick a number each day, 01 through 24, and circle it in the margin. Twenty minutes, timer on. When the timer ends, close the book, whatever state the page is in. In a month you will have a book of twenty-four moods, and your child will have drawn more in that month than in the previous year.

And when one of those pages turns out to be a dragon worth keeping, you know what to do with it: turn it into a personalized storybook. The book is $19.99, the movie $34.99, and the two together $44.99.