Stop asking what it is and start watching what they do.
A child works for twenty minutes at the kitchen table and an adult walks past and asks the one question that ends it. There is a better sentence, and it costs nothing to learn.
Here is a scene that repeats in every house and every classroom. A child has been working at a table for twenty minutes. There is a wet sheet in front of them, a hand covered to the wrist, a jar of water going brown. An adult walks past, glances down, and asks the friendliest question they know: what is it? The child stops. They look at the sheet as though they are seeing it for the first time, and they look at the adult, and then they make something up, because they have understood that an answer is required. Something has just changed, and it is not obvious from the outside how much.
Until that moment the child was doing. They were dragging a loaded brush and feeling the drag. They were noticing that a wet edge pulls into a dry one and a dry edge does not. They were finding out that if you push hard the line goes dark and if you push harder the paper goes furry. None of that is a picture. All of it is the activity, and the activity is the entire value of what was happening. The sheet on the table is not the work. The sheet is the residue of the work, the way sawdust is the residue of cutting. Asking what it is treats the residue as the product and quietly informs the child that the residue was what you were interested in all along.
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