New York ? As the days grow both colder and shorter, children will find themselves indoors more often — and parents and caregivers will be looking to keep them busy.

Courtney Watkins, who teaches a creative enrichment program in Los Angeles, urges adults to invite kids into the kitchen. Letting children’s creative juices flow serves two purposes, she says, as children are both entertained and their minds get a chance to exercise.

“I’ve seen a lot of kids who have a lot of scheduled activities but not a lot of downtime, and in schools, creativity is sort of pushed to the wayside,” says Watkins a former kindergarten and third-grade teacher who also wrote “Courtney’s Creative Adventures.”

Watkins teamed with peanut butter-maker Jif to come up with activities that can be done with ingredients in most pantries. In her book, Watkins suggested kids use peanut butter to make a lady bug, with a spoonful of crunchy peanut butter as the body, raisins for the dots, legs made of pretzel sticks and miniature marshmallows as eyes.

“Parents want to be creative with their kids but they say they’re not creative and don’t know what to do. I say, ‘Look we’re all creative you just need to tap the right buttons,”‘ Watkins says.

Her ideas include:

l With your children, go through the catch-all drawer, known in most homes as the “junk drawer,” looking for interesting items to make a collage. An old postcard or a photo that’s not good enough for the album but no one wants to throw out work well as do buttons and shoelaces.

You could get more specific, asking your children to pick eight items and using them to tell a story through the collage; parents will see buttons become heads, wheels and even toadstools, Watkins says.

l Play “I Spy,” looking for shapes. Once children begin to see the smaller pieces of the whole, they’ll see interesting things in tile patterns, lighting fixtures and the graphics of cereal boxes. “Kids will find this a lot of fun, and they won’t know that it’s good for their brains,” she says.

l Turn the kitchen into a science lab. Mix equal parts cornstarch and water to make “quicksand.” The product is technically called a colloid, but kids don’t need to know that, she says. They’ll have fun watching something that has the properties of both a liquid and a solid.