Creativity or curiosity is an essential development parameter for every child. The mere mention of ‘creative child’ filled any parents with joy and happiness. A child with good creative mind (or imagination/thinking skills) is happier and alert, can cope up with challenges better, and is more likely to grow as well adjusted and secure adult. Parents seek to foster their children’ imagination, and make their child develop more creative sense and curiosity. Due to busy schedule of parent, creativity is one thing which even adults miss in their lives, let alone teach this important skill to their kids. Schools, who are tied up with their curriculum, often rush up on this not so tangible subject. So, with parents and schools are tied up, how do we inspire problem solving attitude and innovative thinking process in our children?
Tips to make kids more creative
How to foster creative thinking among children? We will let them watch and observe strategy. Here are some hacks to boost creativity among children.
Storytelling – When a child learn on stories like Gulliver’ Travel or Alice in a wonderland, there are so many imaginative development that is happening in child. Child is visualizing new things, unfamiliar things, observing strange people and their habits, and trying to make sense of all these. Story telling can be a cornerstone of child’ creative development, and it need to be followed as a routine for your child.
Arts and Craft – It is said that learning by doing is the best memory booster in a long run. Children when they take part in art and craft activities like painting, drawing, molding, clay modeling, sand pit – their imaginative learning process is at full swing. When you ask your child to draw a flower, child will draw various in shapes, size and colors. Each drawing is enriching child’ mind in experimenting with different variables (shape, size, color) to make flower, and hence making each shape is better than earlier. In such activities, tactile experiences are very important, and giving free rein to young kids over their work is critical.
Using natural material or toys – Activities like sand pit, clay modeling, lego boxes etc are catalyst in boosting child’ learning process. Keeping children in touch with physical objects, especially those inherited from nature like sand and clay inspire children’ imagination. Plug and play toys like lego boxes, given endless creative opportunities to children.
Foster a sense of inner space– Parents should keep young children in particular from being overloaded by images from the media, whether it’s television, movies, or computers.
Tips to develop creative mindset among kids
Patience and natural path of growth
There is always a right time for everything. Expecting it earlier will be unripe result and doing it late will be overripe (and often destroyed) result. Parents and teachers need to know that it take time to develop any kind of intelligence among children. We can influence children, to increase their interest with different types of catalyst and change makers, but this doesn’t mean child has developed natural inclination. So, develop some patience, and give opportunities and time to children, so they themselves indulge in natural path of intelligence growth.
Art of questioning
It is said that curious mind is a creative mind. Children are often keen to know on why sky is blue, why apple is red, why there are waves in ocean. No doubt this process of questioning or wondering helps them develop basic blocks of creative intelligence. This process will enhance imaginative skills of children and help them in developing problem solving aptitude. Help in your child learning curiosity by helping explain his/her questions. Often repetitive questioning by kids feels frustrating for parents, and they start ignoring children then. As a parent you need to elaborate and explain little things in simplest ways, so that it helps in building the required intelligentsia in your child.
Teach them about root problem rather than quick fix
As a parent/teacher, many times they simply rush through solutions on questions asked by children. Parents often give quick fixes, and it often leaves a gap in understanding of child. This is due to busy schedule of parent, or simply parents want to avoid subsequent question from the child. Be it a math problem or a real life problem, children need to understand things on basic level, and need to understand different ways of problem solving.
Things that trigger child curiosity
It is necessary that as a parent and teacher you control children imagination run wild, and provide required course correction and feedback on their thought process. Parent and teacher need to provide interest and relevant cues to trigger curiosity, have feedback mechanism and appreciation on doing anything positive by children. Expose children to new and creative ideas and thoughts like arts, literature, museum, toys etc. Talk about interesting arts or natural phenomenon, and involve them in conversation.
Creative Ideas for Kids
Let’s have some creative ideas, and see how child is reacting to these.
- Grow a plant – Start with seed sowing, and follow steps till we have complete plant.
- Art with food items –Make pretend meals with them with things you find around the house that are not food related.
- Alternate use of items– Ask question like what are the other usage of sock. Let children imagination work by asking question of common things and their alternate usage.
- Reverse storytelling and role playing– Ask your child to come up with the story, and choreograph it for a play. Topic could be as simple as visit to a supermarket.
- Using music as positive trigger- Employ the use of music as often as you can when you’re spending time with your child as it triggers different parts of the brain and you could do this by playing different styles of music in different languages. Your kid can feel free to sing or dance to it if they feel up to it.
- Outdoor visit- Take children to places with unique art and sculptures like museum or fort and ask them about what they see and what they think the art represents.
Conclusion
In the end, we can say that creative intelligence is unique to each child. Creativity and curiosity is a building block of intelligence. These intelligence block, if build on right time, will help child in becoming better student and moreover better adult in his/her life. Someone with a high level of creative intelligence will always be more inclined towards letting their creative ability flow by starting up something of their own rather than to just follow what everybody around them is doing. They are also unique to child, and parent and teacher need to carefully make use of catalyst and trigger, and rather avoid forcing anything on child.