Card tricks for kids

Start with these

• The Key Card Trick. Your friend takes any card they like, shows it to everybody except you, and buries it in the deck. 5 minutes to learn, for ages 5 to 11.
• The 21 Card Trick. You deal twenty-one cards into three columns, three times over. 10 minutes to learn, for ages 6 to 11.
• The Four Aces Trick. Your friend cuts the deck into four piles and does all the mixing themselves, following your instructions. 5 minutes to learn, for ages 6 to 11.

What you need, and what a grown-up does

Self-working, and why that matters

A self-working card trick needs no sleight of hand at all: the maths or the setting up does the work, so it cannot go wrong in a child's hands. That is why they are the right first tricks. The Magic Mind Reader is the one to learn first, because Do As I Do and others are built on the same idea of a card you secretly know.

Safety

Every step that uses something hot or a bright light is a grown-up's step, whatever the child's age, and Flick says so out loud before it. There is no fire, no flame and nothing sharp in a child's hand anywhere in the shop: scissors cut paper, card and string only, and a cutting step says to ask a grown-up. No trick asks a child to put anything in a mouth, a nose or an ear. Tricks with coins, dice, paperclips or pom-poms carry the AAP's choking note for brothers and sisters under 4, and none of them is offered below kindergarten. The kitchen-science tricks use only food-safe things, and a potion is always for looking at, not for drinking.

The Magic Shop is free, with no ads and no sign-up. What your child has, has learned and has performed stays on their own device and is never sent anywhere, so there is nothing to lose and no account to make.

More: all 80 magic tricks for kids, Magic School and how to put on a magic show.