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Free worksheet

What is your child actually drawn to?

Print this, put it somewhere you will see it, and spend a week noticing. Twenty-four things children do, across the six kinds of work, with a box for each day you catch one.

One rule, and it is the whole method. Mark what you saw, not what you believe. Not “she is creative” — “she drew for forty minutes without being asked”. Nine to thirteen is when children quietly decide what they are not good at, and a parent’s hunch is the thing most likely to help them decide it early.

See what a finished reading looks like

Living World

MTWTFSS
Stops to watch an animal or an insect, and stays there watching
Feeds or checks on a pet or a creature without being asked
Collects rocks, shells, leaves or bones, and keeps them
Digs, plants or pokes about in soil without being asked to

Build & Fix

MTWTFSS
Builds something from scratch — a den, a model, a contraption
Draws a plan or a sketch of something before making it
Takes something apart to see inside
Takes the tool out of your hand to do it themselves

Tech & AI

MTWTFSS
Changes the rules of a game, or invents a new one, instead of just playing it
Tries to make their own version of a game — on a screen, on paper, or out of things in the room
Asks how a device or an app knows something
Sorts or ranks their own things into an order — cards, scores, collections

Create & Tell

MTWTFSS
Draws, writes or makes something nobody asked for
Tells a made-up story without being asked to
Hums, drums or makes music out of whatever is to hand
Imitates voices, acts out a scene, or puts on a show for people

Care & Understand

MTWTFSS
Goes towards someone who is hurt, rather than stepping back
Fetches the plaster and deals with a small injury themselves
Stops to explain something to someone who hasn’t understood it, in their own words
Argues that something is not fair, and wants it put right

Lead & Organise

MTWTFSS
Tries to sell, trade or swap something for real
Talks other people into their plan
Makes lists, timetables or rules for something nobody asked them to organise
Arranges a space or a shelf into a system of their own

And then what?

A filled-in sheet is not an answer, and we would rather say so than pretend. What it is, is evidence — and the hard part is reading it, because the kinds of work overlap and the counts mean nothing until they are compared against what is normal for the age.

That is the part we built. You enter what you noticed, answer fifteen either-or questions with your child, run a few small activities, and the reading names the three kinds of work they went towards — with what it is not sure about said out loud.

Start with your child →Read a full sample report first

Want the next one?

We are writing more of these — what the readings show across real children, and what turned out to be wrong. Nothing often, and never a sales sequence.

Yours to keep and to hand round — print it for a class or a group if it is useful. The twenty-four prompts come from the same library the product uses, audited so that every one of them asks what a child did rather than what you think they are. About Grow Up Quest