🔍 Discover📚 Language🎭 Pretend play
👵 Tell Me When You Were Little
The best activity in the house just walked through the door — give them a job.
Ages
2–5
Duration
20 min
Cost
Free
👶 Kid challenge
Easy
🧑 Parent energy
Light · no prep
⚠️ Safety first
Stay in the room. Check every piece is too big to swallow before you start.
You know your child best — supervise the whole time and skip anything that isn't right for them. See our Terms.
Why this is good for your child
- ✓Listening
- ✓Family history
What you need
A visiting grandparentAn old photo if there's one to hand
How to do it
- 1Ask the grandparent what they played with at this age.
- 2Have them show it, not just say it.
- 3Try their version together.
How it actually goes
The honest version — including what "going well" looks like at this age.
- ⏱ 30-second set-up
- Thirty seconds: put a visiting grandparent, an old photo if there's one to hand on a tray or a clear bit of floor, and sit down next to it before you call them over.
- 🧑 What you do
- Show it once, slowly, without talking over yourself. Then hand it over and stop helping unless they ask.
- 👶 What they do
- Collect, look closely, and ask the questions.
- ✅ What success looks like
- At 2–3 they'll do it their own way, not yours, and stop after five minutes. Both of those are fine.
- 🧺 How to put it away
- Everything back into one basket or tray, carried back to its spot by them. Naming the spot out loud is what makes it stick.
- 📈 When they outgrow it
- Older? Look one of the finds up in a book together afterwards.