Starting Monday, I’m running a magic club for 10 kids ages 8-11. The club will have 9 one-hour sessions.
I’ve run this club in the past, and my general philosophy is to minimize props: I want to teach the kids to do tricks with everyday objects. The most expensive thing we use is I buy a deck of Bicycle cards for everyone, because they’re so much easier to handle than shitty dollar-store decks. Otherwise, we use coins, string, rope, etc.
Each week I talk about some basic ideas of magic (misdirection, patter, sleight of hand, forced choice) and teach 2-3 tricks, usually a card trick, another trick, and some goofy silly non-trick, like “stick out your tongue and touch your nose.” I try to choose tricks that run themselves when possible, so that kids can put more emphasis on their patter.
Anyway, I wanted to show y’all my list of tricks, and see if anyone knows a real crackerjack trick that I’m missing.
Four Jacks (“levitate” jacks from middle of deck back to top)
Loop of string through neck
Memorized book (math permutations lead to number 1089, and you know the 10th word on the eighth line of the ninth page of a book)
Coin passes through hand (basic palming)
Guess the object (assistant secretly signals the object the audience has chosen)
Mentalist’s alphabet (same thing with a letter of the alphabet)
Aces high (audience cuts cards into four piles and fiddles with them, resulting in an ace atop each pile)
Eliminations (beautiful forced choice where you force the choice of seven, then let them choose the suit and reveal it dramatically)
Cups and Balls (but don’t call it balls when the room is full of third graders, trust me)
Knot Here (combination of fancy knot-tying and palmed rope)
Human Calculator (using tricks about multiplying by 9, pretend to perform hideously complex multiplication/addition in head faster than audience can do it with calculator)
Various other card tricks that are fairly easy to do
A couple other number tricks that rely on weird patterns with multiples of 9
Any ideas?