Video: The Importance of Creativity

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The Importance of Creativity is a video that speaks to my passion for nurturing creativity in children:

Our children need key 21st century skills like the four C’s of COMMUNICATION, COLLABORATION, CREATIVITY and CRITICAL THINKING.

Oh how I wish there was a Children’s Creativity Museum close to me like this museum that’s in San Francisco! Truly an inspirational place, this museum features an animation studio, a community lab, a design studio, imagination lab, innovation lab, music studio, and spiral gallery which is currently showcasing an exhibit called: The World Through the Eyes of Children. How beautiful would that be? It’s an exhibition showcasing over 100 pieces of art work created by children from around the world that “aims to promote insight and understanding of children and youth art and culture from various parts of the world.” Oh, how I wish I could attend this museum on a weekly basis!

Video Screenshot: The Importance of Creativity

Every time I visit their website and blog I’m full of inspirational ideas to create and make and innovate! Forget the kids, I want to make stuff! 😉  Just kidding, (well, not really) but I have a few ideas for March Break projects…

 

Open-ended Art

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We’ve been all about open-ended art up until a recent trip to an art studio which has me thinking more about the value of both open ended art AND ‘art lessons’ or a more guided approach.  Here I want to talk about open ended art and reserve the ‘art lesson’ approach for a different post.

What is open-ended art anyway?

Open-ended art is having no expectations about the product; it’s all about the process. The focus then is not trying to achieve a predetermined outcome, but instead exploring materials and experimenting with the process of creation.  The final outcome might be based on an idea or it might be abstract.  Open ended art is all about free choice, discovery, problem solving and imagination!

“Art opportunities should be open-ended experiences, offered daily, so as to not stifle a child’s own creativity. Open-ended art is developmentally appropriate at all developmental levels and abilities. These opportunities build a child’s self-esteem, eagerness to learn, fine motor skills, and confidence!”   Source article.

The debate about open ended art versus lessons opens up a big discussion which has certainly been discussed at great length among art educators.  (This article over at Deep Space Sparkle discusses this topic from an art educator standpoint. The comments in that article are particularly insightful and exhibit the many varying viewpoints that exist.)  My goal here is to consider how, as a parent, I want to approach art making with my kids at home.

I’ll start with the top five PROS of open-ended art:

(I’ll tackle the pros of the ‘art lesson’ in another post)

  1. The child has the freedom to choose materials they are interested in exploring thus pretty well guaranteeing that the child will be engaged in the activity.
  2. The child comes up with the idea of what they will do (not restrained to working within limits that they may not like).  Again, keeping motivation high.
  3. Learning takes place as child experiments with materials in new ways. Discovering techniques and outcomes independently.
  4. Problem solving takes place as the child is deciding what to do next within the process. Having the freedom to adapt and making changes along the way.
  5. Child gains confidence from the pride of knowing that they created something by themselves! This in my opinion is all the pros wrapped up into the very best outcome!

What I’ve tended to do at home is provide arts and crafts materials and let V decide what she’s going to do with it.

Recently I put out watercolour paints and watercolour paper (along with some other random materials that she always has access to) imagining that she would make some sort of abstract drawings on the beautiful paper that we could later frame and put up around the house. Free original art! But she had a different idea. She pulled out a notepad and started painting whatever came to mind! For a while it was red stick figures…

I left her to create and she got really into this pattern of painting letters of the first initial of each of the names in our family along with a colourful pattern of stripes.

At times she got incredibly frustrated when the colours were blending because of too much water but with a quick little lesson on brush handing and some practice she learned to achieve what she was trying to accomplish. (I learned that there’s sometimes a time and place for a little lesson!)

The key learning for me in all of our open ended art explorations is that when the activity is guided by the child, the passion and inspiration is 100% there. Rashmie of Mommy Labs shares here experience in a blog post called Open-ended Art and Child-led Learning which includes this powerful quote:

A self-motivated soul can do wonders. There’s no limit to his/her creativity and passion.

It is through that post that I found Alissa at Creative with Kids’ fun tongue in cheek “10 Ways to Guarantee You Will Hate Doing Kids Crafts”. I can certainly relate to being guilty of a few items on this list! smirk

I’d love to hear your experiences with open-ended art in your home or classroom! What do you find works/doesn’t work?

 

I am an ARTIST… video

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“… I totally believe that we’re all creative.” 

So do I!

A beautifully inspiring video of artist Danielle Daniel working in her studio. This video perfectly captures the pure joy of creating.

“Teacher, seeker, storyteller, word lover, truth speller, painter and tree hugger. As in one who hugs trees. Learning to take myself less seriously, live in the present, and stand in my light. Trying every day to embrace the good, the bad and the beautiful while learning to get out of my own way to live the life of my dreams.”

Drawn in to learn more about Danielle, I visited her blog to find out that it’s her birthday today and she’s offering 30% off everything in her shop.  I ordered this print called ‘Bosom Friends’ because it sort of reminds me of my girls, one brown haired one almost blondish and how they will grow up to be bosom friends.

 

Giving Thanks

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We spent most of this past weekend at our family cottage enjoying the gorgeous colours of the fall on this wonderful Thanksgiving weekend.

Breathing in fresh air seems to awaken my creative spirit. I find that all I want to do is get creative when I’m up there. This time we decided to make place card stones to place on our table for the big dinner (inspired by The Artful Parent’s Thankful Stones).  We successfully played around with the project at home a couple of weeks ago…

… but this time our crayon colours came out too dark and it was too hard to read the names.

Right about the time that we were discovering that our project wasn’t working so great, my handy dad appeared with a piece of birch trunk and offered to cut it up into small discs that we could use for name cards for our Thanksgiving dinner table. He’s very creative! They worked out great!

In honour of giving thanks on this beautiful Thanksgiving weekend, I decided that we could use the extra birch pieces to play a fun game. This is how it worked:

When everyone arrived for dinner I asked each person to write or draw what they are thankful for on the piece of wood and secretly put it in this paper bag.

Once I had them all, I displayed them in the center of our table for all to enjoy during dinner.

At the end of our dinner we had fun reading the thankful words, drawings, and messages and guessing who they came from!

We had a blast guessing who wrote what. Some were obvious, others not so much! We all guessed wrong for “walks with mom and dad”. Turns out it was Archie’s, my brother’s dog!

Happy Thanksgiving to all that are celebrating today!

The Global Cardboard Challenge

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Caine’s Arcade is an absolute touching story. What pulls my heartstrings the most is the proud look on Caine’s face and his sweet toothless smile!  There’s NOTHING like the look of pure joy on a child’s face when they’ve accomplished something they’re proud of.

What’s more is that this story and the response to it inspired The Imagination Foundation. “The Imagination Foundation’s mission is to find, foster, and fund creativity and entrepreneurship in kids like Caine.”

Today is actually the Global Cardboard Challenge where people around the world are hosting events for kids to create using just cardboard and their imaginations. Anyone anywhere can play. “The idea is just to bring the whole world together to play and celebrate creativity and imagination.”

What a beautiful story and important project. Love that Nirvan Mullick, the filmmaker behind Caine’s Arcade, says “this all started with going to buy a door handle” but ended up buying a funpass! He not only found joy in discovering Caine’s arcade but did something to celebrate it. Then did something even bigger with the attention his short film received by keeping the creative momentum going and starting the Imagination Foundation.  Goes to show that when you believe in something and put your heart into it, amazing things happen. I’m inspired… again.

Creating Innovators

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Creating Innovators. The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World addresses these questions through in-depth profiles of young innovators and the adults who have made a difference in their lives, as well as vivid descriptions of innovation-driven classrooms and places of work.

YES! This is what my intention for this blog is all about. Looking at what we can do as parents and caregivers and teachers to foster creative minds that will innovate and make positive changes in the world!

Some quotes from the video that resonate with me:

“Raising someone with an intention that they’ll be an innovator is actually different than raising a child that you want to behave all the time and be quite compliant.” – Annemarie Neal, Cisco Vice President

“Let them fail because they are going to learn more from that than we can ever teach them directly.”

“Our success is measured by the rate of innovation.”

This leaves me pondering: what more can I do to encourage my children to be innovators?

Here are some answers to my own question; some of which I’ve instinctively been practicing. It’s a work in progress and there’s certainly always a lot of room for pushing and challenging myself to inspire and create learning opportunities for my kids at home. In any case, this is where I’m at in the process:

  • Provide opportunities to practice decision making.
  • Support the decision made.
  • As per supporting and encouraging independent thinking via decision making (as an example), build confidence. One example is standing behind decisions that are made. Providing positive feedback and praise when appropriate and relevant. Or acknowledging good thinking and new ideas: “that’s a great idea!”
  • Provide problem solving activities regularly.  A lot of times children will come up with their own challenges to solve. Ha! Like the time V wanted to get through the fence to visit the neighbourhood girls. She decided she’d use scissors to cut a hole in the wood to crawl through. When that didn’t work she ran inside to get a pencil to draw a door that she could open. This went on for a while! I can’t actually remember how she resolved her challenge.
  • Dedicate time each day where children can follow their own interests and curiosities, daydream or pursuit a project/game/activity idea.

What are ways that you foster innovation with your kids?

Makedo Project 1

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The possibilities are really endless with these cardboard connectors! It was also the perfect activity to take to the cottage since there always seem to be boxes around and they come in a small cylinder container making it very easy to transport.

V is still too young to cut the boxes and actually poke the holes for the connectors but she directed the entire process! Surprise surprise!  It started as a zamboni… the amount of snow outside inspired that idea!

But then evolved into a fire truck.. inspired by the flame in the wood stove…

… then a sleigh…

Very very fun! What’s really cool about these very simple (I don’t even know what to call them…) doo dads is that it’s open ended and creates the opportunity for A LOT of play. It starts with the planning and gathering materials, then there’s building and problem solving and finally playing, playing and more playing. At which point it all starts all over again with decorating, adapting and playing in different ways.

8 Ways to Stay Creative

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Here’s another – the web designer’s version designed as Desktop Wallpaper.

Source

#4 and #8 spoke to me the most:

Out of curiosity I checked out the company behind this design.  What an amazing looking place to work! 4 day work week, all the perks to make you feel good about where you work which in turn inspires you to put your best work forward. Very wise and I like their design.

I’ll leave you with a graphic from their ‘Values’ page from their site.

Day Dreaming and Free Play

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I’m taking some time this weekend reflecting on how we’ll spend our ‘free’ time in the upcoming weeks and months over winter.  I like the idea of getting V involved in activities like swimming and gymnastics to get her moving but I’m torn because I like the free play that she engages with on her own. She comes up with the most random little activities almost like mini science experiments or musical and dance performances. It’s amazing.

I came across this passage from Naomi Aldort in response to a mother’s question about her child seeming bored at home and it’s encouraged me to reconsider scheduling activities (in the mornings anyway).

Know that day dreaming and doing “nothing” is when the greatest learning takes place. What you call “bored” comes from believing the idea that he should play and be busy externally. Yet, just because we are trained to expect play and activities does not mean that it is best for the child. It is not. Keep in mind Einstein’s famous words, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” When free to be themselves, and without parental expectations hovering over their heads, children spend much time daydreaming, imagining things and stories, listening and gazing at nature. This is an amazing learning tool that you don’t want to interrupt.

… Expose him to life opportunities, and let him take what he is drawn to in his own time and his own way. And, cherish his hours of pondering and inner work.

Imagination vs. Reality

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I drafted this post several months ago when Violet was just about three and a half. I still chuckle over this story…

Violet’s 3 year old imagination has been exploding lately. It’s fascinating to see her come up with all of these ideas.. only I’m realizing that with that comes a responsibility as the parent to maintain balance between what is make believe and what is real.

For example, the other day Violet decided she would plant some beans (jelly beans) in the garden to grow a giant bean stalk (a la Jack and the Beanstalk, we’ve been reading a lot of stories lately). In attempt to foster her imagination and creativity I asked her what would be at the top of the beanstalk? She firmly decided that there would not be a scary giant up there but instead there would be a princess named Ivy (a la The Princess and the Frog). Great! So I gave her the little pack of jelly beans. She ate a couple then made her way out to the back garden and threw the jelly beans down just like in the story! Pretty harmless right?

Well, a little while later Violet decided that she would be going to Dora’s house for the afternoon to attend a party. Cute right? I asked how she would get there and she told me that she planned on jumping into the tv… which she later edited and said that daddy would have to give her a great big push to get into the tv. She was pumped about the party in which she said there would be balloons (her favourite), cupcakes, presents etc. and that she would meet Dora’s mom and grandma. She proceeded to pack her backpack with her swimsuit and all sorts of things. She picked fresh flowers from a vase in our living room and put them into a gift bag and made her way down to the basement, where we have our big tv and tried to ‘jump in’. The disappointment that ensued all came to a head when she realized that ‘IT’S NOT WORKING!!!’ Oh the disappointment!  I certainly learned my lesson in leading her on too far without explaining the difference between imagination and reality.

I was sort of enjoying the innocence but it was time to explain the difference between make believe and real life and that the stories we read and see on tv are not real. Part of me didn’t want to squash that imaginary world – it was so refreshing.. but I can’t have my kid thinking she can bust into the tv either! 🙂