Sometimes our imaginations seem stalled. Here’s an idea for jumpstarting creativity. All you need are a pair of dice, a mailing label or other blank sticker, and some drawing paper.
Cut the mailing label into six small bits that can cover the sides of one of the dice. Before you put the labels on, write one of these words on each of the six tiny pieces of sticker: heads, tails, legs, eyes, horns/antennae, wings. Then put the worded label on each side of the die. (Die is the singular for the plural of dice, but it never does sound right.)
Now have the kids take turns rolling the regular number die and the newly labeled die. They might get a two and the word “tails”. Their creature will need to have two tails. Roll again and find out that it needs three head, one horn, and six legs. If they roll tails again, they have the option of changing the number of tails or adding them together so that the creature might now have five tails. You can also add another die with color options on it.
Kids really like the dice aspect of this game, but if you don’t have dice you can simply write down the numbers on small pieces of paper and write down the body parts on others. Put the papers in two different bowls or bags and have the kids draw from each bowl to find out what their creature needs. This option lets you have more than six numbers and more than six body parts, so it can be extra fun. The creatures might need 100 spots, or 40 whiskers, or three fangs, or whatever other fun things your children can think of drawing. This makes a great emergency travel game!
Usually after a few turns of the dice telling them what to draw, children will come up with their own ideas of what they want their creature to look like. I encourage that. I think the whole point of this exercise is to wake up those creative brains!
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