Planning Activities Based on Children’s Needs

Successful Solutions Professional Development LLC

Chapter 4

Encouraging Creativity

Chapter Topics

Creativity, like talent, is somewhat inborn. However, you can do a lot to motivate children to be creative. Good providers use a well-designed program stocked with open-ended materials and resources.

Chapter 4

Encouraging Creativity

Planning Activities Based on Children’s Needs

Chapter 4 Encouraging Creativity

Children use creativity when they play, and they grow

intellectually through playing.

Child care providers should encourage the natural creativity that exists in all children. It is important that child care providers supply the necessary encouragement and tools needed to promote a child’s creativity.

Planning Activities Based on Children’s Needs

It helps them develop self-expression, which allows them to convey views and feelings about themselves and the world around them. Being able to express themselves also enables them to communicate their needs.

Creativity helps children learn and grow in several ways:

Creativity is important to children.

Chapter 4 Encouraging Creativity

• Intellectually• Socially• Emotionally• Imaginatively

Planning Activities Based on Children’s Needs

When a child mixes red and yellow paints to make orange, or asks an endless stream of imaginative “what if” questions, he/she is thinking and growing intellectually. When children use imagination and pretend to be dancers, firefighters, doctors, or airplane pilots, they are growing intellectually.

Creativity stimulates intellectual growth in children.

Chapter 4 Encouraging Creativity

Planning Activities Based on Children’s Needs

Every creative experience helps develop children’s brains.

Creativity helps children grow socially because they get the chance to experience other children’s viewpoints as they play make-believe games and share stories.

Chapter 4 Encouraging Creativity

The more information children acquire about the viewpoints of others, the more they will respect the rights, beliefs, and feelings of others.

Creativity helps children grow emotionally and imaginatively because it reflects what they feel, think, and see. It allows them not only to observe the world the way it is, but also visualize how it might be.

Planning Activities Based on Children’s Needs

Children are not always concerned with how things are, but rather with how they think they are.

Child care providers should help children develop their imaginations and minds. To encourage creative behavior, providers should:

Chapter 4 Encouraging Creativity

• Join in to imagine and create with the children

• Respond positively to what children do and encourage their individual creativity

• Discuss ideas and thoughts with the children, allowing them to use their own imaginations rather than giving them specific instructions on how to do, draw, or write something

Planning Activities Based on Children’s Needs

Children express creativity in all areas of play, but four main creative areas of play that are intellectually stimulating are:

Chapter 4 Encouraging Creativity

• Art• Language• Music• Fantasy

Planning Activities Based on Children’s Needs

Art allows children to express thoughts and feelings visually.

Chapter 4 Encouraging Creativity

Younger children may not be able to verbally express feelings of anger or frustration, but they might be able to draw them in a picture using dark colors and bold, jagged strokes.

Art

Encourage the children to express themselves with art. Have them draw pictures that show emotions like happiness, sadness, fear, or anger. This will encourage them to think about emotions, and can lead to discussions about how to express them appropriately, or how to react to others’ emotions and feelings.

Planning Activities Based on Children’s Needs

Children use spoken or written language to express their thoughts and ideas.

Chapter 4 Encouraging Creativity

When they make up stories, act out impromptu plays and skits, or play pretend, they are creatively using language to convey what they want to say. Start telling a story and let the children continue it. If they are too young to write, have them tell the story verbally. Encouraging this type of creative expression can help the children build their vocabularies as well as enhance speaking ability.

Language

Planning Activities Based on Children’s Needs

Children use fantasy to learn about their world.

Chapter 4 Encouraging Creativity

They learn creative self-expression through having imaginary friends, playing make-believe, and daydreaming. When they pretend to be superheroes or airplane pilots, children learn how to interact with others. They learn how to take charge and be the leader. They may develop skills that will be useful later to real-live situations. Encourage fantasy play by having very young children pretend to “write” a story, then have them “read” it to you.

Fantasy

Ask older children to describe how they think a giraffe talks to its children, or join in a “conversation” with them, with each person having an assigned role in the giraffe family.

Planning Activities Based on Children’s Needs

Chapter 4 Encouraging Creativity

For too many children, curiosity fades. Curiosity

dimmed is a future denied.

Our potential — emotional, social, and cognitive — is expressed through the quantity and quality of our experiences.

The less-curious child will make fewer new friends, join fewer social groups, read fewer books, and take fewer hikes. The less-curious child is harder to teach because he is harder to inspire, enthuse, and motivate.

Supporting Learning through

Curiosity

Planning Activities Based on Children’s Needs

There are three common ways adults constrain or even crush the enthusiastic exploration of the curious child:

Chapter 4 Encouraging Creativity

1) Fear2) Disapproval 3) Absence!

Supporting Learning through

Curiosity

Planning Activities Based on Children’s Needs

Chapter 4 Encouraging Creativity

FearFear kills curiosity. When the child's world is chaotic or when he is afraid, he will not like novelty. He will seek the familiar, staying in his comfort zone, unwilling to leave and explore new things. Children impacted by war, natural disasters, family distress, or violence all have their curiosity crushed.

Supporting Learning through

Curiosity

Planning Activities Based on Children’s Needs

Chapter 4 Encouraging Creativity

Disapproval"Don’t touch. Don’t climb. Don’t yell. Don’t take that apart. Don’t get dirty. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t." Children sense and respond to our fears, biases, and attitudes. If we convey a sense of disgust at the mud on their shoes and the slime on their hands, their discovery of tadpoles will be diminished.

Supporting Learning through

Curiosity

Planning Activities Based on Children’s Needs

Chapter 4 Encouraging Creativity

AbsenceThe presence of a caring, invested adult provides two things essential for optimal exploration:

Supporting Learning through

Curiosity

1) a sense of safety from which to set out to discover new things

2) the capacity to share the discovery and, thereby, get the pleasure and reinforcement from that discovery

Planning Activities Based on Children’s Needs

Chapter 4 Encouraging Creativity

Recognize individual differences in children’s styles of curiosity.

Teacher Tips

Some want to explore with only their minds, others in more physical ways — touching, smelling, tasting, and climbing. To some degree these differences are related to temperamental differences in the exploratory drive.

Some children are more timid; others are more comfortable with novelty and physical exploration. Yet even the timid child will be very curious, though he may require more encouragement and reinforcement to leave safe and familiar situations.

Planning Activities Based on Children’s Needs

Module 3

Chapter 4 Encouraging Creativity

Try to redefine "failure."

Teacher Tips

In truth, curiosity often leads to more mess than mastery, but it is how we handle the mess that helps encourage further exploration, and thereby, development.

Redefine failure.

When the 5-year-old is learning to jump rope and he trips a thousand times, this is not a thousand failures — it is determination.

Planning Activities Based on Children’s Needs

Chapter 4 Encouraging Creativity

It is important to remember when planning and leading creative activities to remain flexible and open to changing your plans.

Creative Activities

Children may think of different ways to use craft materials, move to music, or carry out an experiment. This is not only “okay,” it is to be encouraged. Some children are always eager to apply their own creativity to a situation and others may catch their enthusiasm.

Planning Activities Based on Children’s Needs

For these children, the planned activity serves as a stimulus, suggesting many more options than you had envisioned. If the result of your planned activity is to spark creativity, then, it is a success.

Chapter 4 Encouraging Creativity

Some suggestions for activities that can promote creativity:

Creative Activities

Make up a new ending. Read a story out loud; stop at an exciting moment. Children can work alone, in pairs, or in small groups to make up their own ending to the story. Children can read or perform the new endings, then read the author’s ending.

Paper bag plays. Place a variety of props in several large paper bags. Each bag should have at least as many props as there are children in a group. Give each group a bag. Ask the children to make up a play using the props. Have children perform their plays the same day. The “actors” tend to lose their spontaneity if they have to wait until the next day to perform.

Planning Activities Based on Children’s Needs

Chapter 4 Encouraging Creativity

Some suggestions for activities that can promote creativity:

Creative Activities

Make African thumb pianos. Have children place different lengths of tongue depressors between a piece of wood and the edge of a table. The weight of the wood will keep the tongue depressors in place. Shorter segments will make higher sounds. Children can experiment with different lengths to tune the instrument to play different songs.

Planning Activities Based on Children’s Needs

Chapter 4 Encouraging Creativity

Some suggestions for activities that can promote creativity:

Creative Activities

Tell me about yourself. Put out a box of photographs of people – old family photos from a second-hand shop, photos from magazines, photos taken by staff or children. The photos should be inclusive of many types of children and families. Ask children to work in pairs. Each pair selects a photo; one child pretends to be the person in the photo while the other acts as an interviewer. The pairs can write or tape-record the “autobiography.” “I was born in Topeka in 1945. My parents ran a small grocery store. I had six brothers, four sisters and…..”

Planning Activities Based on Children’s Needs

Chapter 4 Encouraging Creativity

Some suggestions for activities that can promote creativity:

Creative Activities

Count to a million (or as close as you can get). Ask pairs of small groups to think of something – indoors or outdoors – which is made up of a million different parts. For example, children might estimate there are a million grains of sand in the sandbox, a million blades of grass, a million leaves on a tree, or a million floor tiles. Next, ask children to prove their estimate is reasonable. For example, to prove there are a million blades of grass on the field, they might measure the area of the whole field, count the blades of grass in one square foot area, and use these two measurements to estimate how many blades of grass are on the field.

Planning Activities Based on Children’s Needs

Chapter 4 Encouraging Creativity

Some suggestions for activities that can promote creativity:

Creative Activities

Let me tell you about life on earth. Ask children to use whatever creative medium they prefer to tell a visitor from another planet what daily life is like on earth. Cultural practices they might want to explain include: transportation, sleeping habits, clothes, food (home-cooked and restaurants), toys and games, houses and other buildings, sports, leisure activities, and any others the children think of. Creative media might include drawing, painting, making a video, storytelling, creating a photo mural (using original photos or pictures from magazines), songwriting, or any others the children think of.

Planning Activities Based on Children’s Needs

Chapter 4 Encouraging Creativity

Some suggestions for activities that can promote creativity:

Creative Activities

Make up new rules for a familiar game. When children seem bored with games and sports, involve them in making up new rules and new ways to play. For example, they might play a variation of baseball by using different equipment –street hockey sticks (instead of bats) and small rubber balls (instead of softballs). Players could run around the bases and score runs, as in baseball; however, children might want to change the rules in other ways to make the game new and different.

Planning Activities Based on Children’s Needs

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Chapter 4 Encouraging Creativity

Planning Activities Based on Children’s Needs