Enriching Children's Creativity

What is creativity?

Creativity is an ability to construct new and original designs or solutions.It can be an idea, thought, movement or a rearrangement of existing combination of ideas, thoughts or movements. It is a quality of being constructive and producing something as a work of thought or imagination.

Processes going on in creativity

Multidimensional aspects that are involved in the creative processes are enlisted below:

• Understanding
• Constructing
• Arranging
• Sorting
• Discriminating
• Identifying
• Matching
• Associating
• Problem Solving
• Quantifying
• Comparing
• Drawing
• Painting
• Graphing
• Imagining
• Classifying
• Incorporating
• Judging
• Articulating
• Reasoning
• Designing
• Experiencing
• Predicting
• Describing
• Creating Ideas
• Balancing
• Manipulating

Nature of creativity

No doubt the various processes or aspects working in creativity promote and enhance the child's conceptualisation or perception, observation, expression, integration and symbolisation all of which in turn improves learning.

Where does training in Creativity (Arts and Crafts) lead to in terms of outcomes?

In order to accrue the outcomes of training in arts and crafts or creativity, what must a parent do? How should he or she assist?

• Respect the individuality of the child.
• Encourage child directed, spontaneous exploration.
• Offer materials for a range of results.
• Let the child test ideas and learn from mistakes.
• Offer positive feedback and praise the child's efforts.
• Encourage to continue creative efforts.
• Allow the child to complete his product.
• Provide a space for the child's products.
• Help the child feel he can and let him provide for future activity.
• Allow the child to be messy. Accept messiness around to a certain extent.
• Repeat opportunities. Do not push a child too much.
• Permit experiencing success in his own way.
• Focus interrelationships and allow to share discoveries.
• Answer questions promptly. Let the child sharpen his senses.
• Teach safety rules.
• Offer help to the child when he needs assistance.
• Listen to the child's ideas and experiment together if needed.