Kim's Tray — What's Under the Tea Towel?

The classic scouting memory game, played with six kitchen-drawer objects and one extra ingredient — the child learns a trick for remembering (naming and grouping) instead of just staring and hoping.

  1. Lay the tray. Put six small, familiar objects on a tray — for example a spoon, a fork, a sock, a glove, a toy car, a toy train. Choose them so they fall into two or three natural groups.
  2. Look and name. Give the child about 30 seconds to look. Have them touch and name each object out loud.
  3. Teach the trick. Ask “Which ones go together?” and let the child slide them into families — things to eat with, things to wear, things with wheels. Say the families together.
  4. Cover. Drape a tea towel over the tray.
  5. Wait a little. Do something else for a minute or two — ten star jumps, a trip to the bathroom to wash hands, a song.
  6. Recall. “What’s under the tea towel?” The child tells you as many as they can. If they stall, give a family clue (“Anything you wear?”) rather than the answer.
  7. Reveal with a flourish and check together. Then swap — the child lays a tray for you.

Variation: Play “What’s Missing?” — the child closes their eyes, you remove one object from under the towel, and they work out which one has gone. Or play the outdoor version with six things found on a walk (leaf, stone, feather, stick, pine cone, flower).

Requirements

  • Space: A table or a patch of floor
  • Surface: Tray, chopping board, or baking sheet
  • Materials: Six small household objects and a tea towel or cloth
  • Participants: 1 adult + 1 child; works well with 2–3 children taking turns
  • Supervision: Light — adult sets up, covers, and keeps time

Rationale & Objective

“Recalls 4+ items from a list of 6 after a brief delay” is a measurement for this subdomain, and Teaching Strategies GOLD Objective 12a tracks the same thing (recalling items removed from view, and later using “a few deliberate strategies to remember information”). The interesting part at age 5 is the strategy. Classic studies showed that kindergarteners rarely rehearse or group items on their own (Flavell, Beach & Chinsky, 1966; Moely, Olson, Halwes & Flavell, 1969) — yet when someone shows them how, they can do it and their recall improves. Researchers call this a production deficiency — the tool works, the child just doesn’t think to pick it up. Naming the objects aloud and sorting them into families gives the child two such tools. Coffman, Ornstein, McCall & Curran (2008) found that first-graders whose teachers talked more about how to remember went on to use memory strategies more skilfully, which is exactly the kind of talk this game invites at home.

Progress Indicators

  • Early: recalls 1–2 objects, usually the last ones looked at; does not name or sort unless told to; may guess objects that were not there
  • Developing: recalls 3–4 of 6 after a one-minute wait; names objects aloud when reminded; uses a family clue from the adult to retrieve more
  • Proficient: recalls 4–5 of 6 after a 1–2 minute wait; sorts objects into groups without being asked; recalls them family by family
  • Advanced: recalls 6 of 6, or 6–7 of 8; invents own tricks (making up a silly story linking the objects); can explain how they remembered

Safety Notes

  • Choose objects with no sharp edges or points; skip knives, scissors, pins, and glass
  • If younger siblings are around, avoid coins, marbles, button batteries, and anything else small enough to swallow
  • Keep the mood light — a child who feels tested will guess wildly; say “the towel is tricky today” and drop back to four or five objects
  • Children’s memory span varies a lot at this age; a child who recalls three is not “behind”
  • If your child consistently cannot recall even two familiar objects after a short wait, and also struggles to follow simple instructions, raise it with your pediatrician or teacher

Hints

  • Playfulness: be a magician — wave a wooden spoon over the towel, say a magic word, whip it off dramatically. Let the child lay a tray for you and “forget” one on purpose so they can catch you
  • Sustain interest: theme the tray — bathroom things, things from the garden, the child’s own treasures, things that are all red. A new set of objects makes it a new game
  • Common mistake: covering the tray before the child has named anything. Silent looking is the weakest way to remember; touching and saying each name is what makes it stick
  • Limited space: play it in a shoebox lid on your lap, or in the car with six things from a bag covered by a scarf
  • Cross-domain: sorting into families is classification; counting how many were remembered and how many are still hiding is early subtraction; describing a forgotten object (“it’s metal, you eat soup with it”) builds vocabulary
  • Progression: 4 objects, no wait → 6 objects, one-minute wait → 6 objects, five-minute wait with an activity in between → 8 objects → objects with no obvious families → child chooses a strategy and tells you which one they used

Sources

  • Teaching Strategies GOLD — Objective 12a (Recognizes and recalls; uses strategies to remember)
  • Flavell, J.H., Beach, D.R. & Chinsky, J.M. (1966), “Spontaneous verbal rehearsal in a memory task as a function of age,” Child Development, 37(2)
  • Moely, B.E., Olson, F.A., Halwes, T.G. & Flavell, J.H. (1969), “Production deficiency in young children’s clustered recall,” Developmental Psychology, 1(1)
  • Coffman, J.L., Ornstein, P.A., McCall, L.E. & Curran, P.J. (2008), “Linking teachers’ memory-relevant language and the development of children’s memory skills,” Developmental Psychology, 44(6)
  • Schneider, W. & Pressley, M. (1997), Memory Development Between Two and Twenty (2nd ed.) — development of rehearsal and organizational strategies
  • Kim’s Game — from Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), adopted as an observation and memory game in Scouting