Secrets and mysteries feed our imagination, and are part of a fantastic world that children create spontaneously and naturally.

With this Play Invitation, children can explore storytelling and mark-making while choosing and inventing symbols.

What Could Lead Us to This Play Invitation

  • Children have been curious about secrets and managing information;
  • Children are excited about uncovering secrets, and solving mysteries while going on adventures;
  • Children have been exploring secret passages and secret places.

Materials Needed

  • Colored pencils in a variety of colors
  • White construction paper
  • Black construction paper
  • Tape or stapler

Setting up This Play Invitation

  1. Prepare each child’s secret coloring page by stapling or taping a black cover over the white construction paper.

    Tips: As children love secrets and pretend play, you can introduce this Play Invitation by whispering and enacting a highly secret scene.

How to Create the Secret Drawing

  1. Tell the children that their secret coloring page is their secret color keeper and they can color their favorite colors on the white paper and hide them with their “color keeper.”

How to Nurture the Natural Unfolding of the Child’s Identity During This Play Invitation

  • Children have the right to explore make-believe. It is up to the educator to recognize opportunities to feed their imagination and to invite symbolic games, offering materials and proposals that welcome and value this form of expression. The way this Play Invitation is presented, and the context created around it, will determine how each child gets involved.

The Academic Learning Opportunities

  • LANGUAGE: Use language for storytelling.
  • PHYSICAL: Develop the concept of perspective (what others see) and position.
  • SOCIAL: Managing information, and following instructions.

Extensions

Create lemon paint (squeezing lemons into a bowl) and invite children to use it to create drawings on white paper. This “paint” is invisible until you heat the paper, which you can do by ironing it. They can send secret messages to each other or start a correspondence with other classrooms.

Book Recommendations

Purchase book here.

Do You Have a Secret? helps kids distinguish between good and bad secrets.

Purchase book here.

This book introduces Braille to young readers through the characters Oscar and Lucy.