Fun Low-Prep Confidence Building Activities To Do With Your 7-Year-Old Niece
Lila twisted the hem of her sequined unicorn pajamas on my couch last month, the night her mom left for a work conference and she moved in with me for four days. “I’m not good at anything except coloring,” she mumbled, staring at her scuffed white sneakers. She’d just gotten cut from the rec soccer team she’d begged to join, and her teacher had mentioned at parent-teacher conferences that she never raises her hand, even when she definitely knows the answer. I’d promised my sister I’d do more than just plop her in front of the TV while I worked, so I racked my brain for something that didn’t require a 30-minute car trip or a bunch of expensive craft supplies. I didn’t plan to make every activity about confidence, but that’s what they ended up being.
I was rearranging my bookshelf that morning, fresh off getting a box of used children’s books from a friend, when Lila hovered by the doorway saying she didn’t want to mess it up. I told her I didn’t care what it looked like, and I needed a curator specifically for the picture book section. She got to sort them any way she wanted, no right or wrong answers. At first she tried to do alphabetical by author, like I do with my adult books, but half an hour later she’d rearranged all of them by the color of the cover, all the blues together, all the pinks, all the greens with dinosaurs on the spine. When I joked that blue had way more books than pink, she crossed her arms and said “that’s just how the world works, you said I got to choose.” By the end of the day she was walking her mom through the whole arrangement on FaceTime, pointing out her favorite hidden spots for the animal stories. I’d never thought of sorting books as a confidence activity before, but I got it that day. Most things a 7-year-old does follow rules an adult made: color inside the lines, stand in line, do the math problem the way the teacher showed you. This was just her call, no input needed from me.
We were bored after lunch on the second day, warm enough to hang out on the back porch, and I was about to set up a small obstacle course for her when she shook her head and said she wanted to build it. I just handed her the sidewalk chalk I keep by the back door and stepped back. She dragged patio chairs over to make a tunnel to crawl through, coiled the garden hose into a zig zag to step through, propped my dusty old hula hoop up against the fence to jump through, and wrote the rules in chalk at the start: no cutting corners, last person does 10 jumping jacks. I messed up the zig zag once, and she made me do 12 instead of 10, just because she felt like it. Being the boss for 20 minutes is way more useful than me telling her she’s a good leader. She got to make the rules, enforce them, change them halfway through if she wanted, and no one could tell her she was doing it wrong.
For snack that day, I tried something I’d read about a while back that I was curious about: reverse cooking. I told her I’d never made peanut butter banana roll ups the right way, I always put way too much peanut butter. Could she teach me? I got out all the ingredients, gave her a dull butter knife so she could cut the banana safely, and let her walk me through every step. When I put the peanut butter on wrong, she corrected me, wiped it off with a paper towel and showed me how to spread it thin all the way to the edges. It came out fine, and we ate them on the porch steps, and she said she’s going to open a restaurant when she grows up that only sells these. Kids are used to adults teaching them everything, all day long. Letting them be the expert, even for something as silly as a snack roll up, makes them feel like their knowledge actually matters.
When she was drawing after snack, she crumpled up a piece of paper and threw it in the trash because she’d drawn the head of her mermaid too big. I pulled it out, and said that’s just a mermaid with a big brain, that’s better. We kept going, and ended up with five other messed up drawings: my lopsided cat, her wonky cup, a tree I messed up the branches on. We taped all of them to the inside of my pantry door, and wrote next to each what the original mistake turned into. Her too-big mermaid head became a mermaid who ate 10 ice creams. My lopsided cat became a fat cat who ate too many cookies. That’s how our mistake gallery started. 7-year-olds get told “that’s wrong” so many times a day, even accidentally. This turns mistakes into something worth showing off, not hiding. I didn’t have to give her a speech about how it’s okay to mess up – we just did it, and she got the point.
I used to think confidence building was about cheering the loudest at games or telling your kid they’re the best at everything. But that doesn’t stick, because when they don’t win, or they get something wrong, they think all that praise was a lie. These activities don’t require any special skills, any money, or any advance planning. You just have to step back and let them lead. You don’t even have to gush over every little thing they do – when Lila sorted the books, I just asked her to tell me about her system, and that was enough.
Lila went home four days later, and she left the mistake gallery up on my pantry door. Last weekend she called me, all excited, and said she raised her hand in class to answer a math question, and she got it wrong. Instead of sitting down and hiding, she told her class “I made a mistake, that one can go in my mistake gallery at home.” She still gets shy sometimes, she still says she’s bad at soccer, she still crumples up drawings if they don’t turn out right the first time. I don’t think four days of silly activities fixed all that forever. But right now, it’s working. Small, silly little things that let her call the shots are way better than any big speech I could ever give about being confident.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Fun Low-Prep Confidence Building Activities To Do With Your 7-Year-Old Niece