Teaching Your Child Magic

From Harry Potter to the Wizard of Oz, children have been conditioned to love illusion and magic

. You can teach your child magic and have quality time.

Here are three easy tricks you can teach your children, and before long, they'll be putting on their own magic shows.

"Find the card" is an easy trick that's been around for ages. Take any 52-card deck of cards and make sure you sneak a look at the bottom card in the deck. Let's pretend it is the queen of hearts. Fan out the cards and ask the audience to pick one. Run your hand over the cards to make them back into a stack. Tell the child to put the card at the top of the deck. Tell them to take the bottom half of the deck and place it on top. Take the entire deck and fan it out, with the cards facing up. Look for your original bottom card - the queen of Hearts - and the card your child picked will be the next one below it.

Making a coin disappear adds dexterity. To teach this trick to a child, practice holding the quarter on its edges between your index finger and thumb, with the palm of your hand facing your chest. Use your right hand if you're right-handed, left hand if you're left-handed. Practice passing the coin to your other hand. Once you have the swap down, instead of passing the quarter to your other hand, say the magic words: "Abracadabra, make this coin disappear!" At the same time, use the index and middle fingers on your empty hand to knock the quarter into the palm of the hand holding the quarter. Pretend you're grabbing the coin in your empty hand. Show your empty hand and say that it disappeared.

Here's one that adds a dash of geometry and a science lesson to the fun. You will need a few ingredients: tinfoil pan or plate, water, some flat toothpicks, and the magic ingredient: clear liquid dishwashing soap. Dip one of the toothpicks in the soap, and sit it nearby. Rinse the pan well to make sure it's clean, then fill it with water. Arrange five toothpicks - don't include the soapy one - in the shape of a pentagon: edges overlapping a bit to form a five-sided shape on the surface of the water. Once you've demonstrated, let your child form the pentagon several times because it takes some practice to get it just right.

Practice some words for the audience, such as you've cast a spell on a sixth toothpick to break up the pentagon. Grab the sixth toothpick that was in soap, and say s spell over it. Close your eyes and make it look more entertaining.

Take the soapy magic toothpick and dip it into the center or the pentagon.

Here's where the science comes in. Explain that all things, including water, are made up tiny things called molecules. Water molecules tend to cling together - you can demonstrate this by spilling some water on a table and pointing out how it blobs together to form a droplet.

The soap on the magic toothpick has different molecules. The magic works just like that! This trick will never get old.

by: Todd Fox

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