“Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use – do the work you want to see done.”
– Austin Kleon
The word “Creativity” is too broad an idea to fit into a brief description or a concept. It is more than just an idea. It is originality, innovation, cognizance, it is imagination, it is art and it is a vision. Creativity is EVERYTHING. It is an all-embracing concept intertwined with a lot of other ideas for a whole new creation.
Creativity being a form of expression in the most natural form, it is perhaps one of the only things in life which would never get totally used up. Maya Angelou thought that the more of creativity you use, the more you have.
Every child is born with the ability to be creative. This ability is primarily nurtured and transformed through their early years of growth making it the most crucial stage to channel and encourage the child’s creative abilities.
The capacity to be naturally creative and comprehensive could get restricted if the child’s environment in the growing years is void of platforms and opportunities to showcase their ideas that arise from their raw imagination. This slowly robs the child’s naturally gifted creative capacity. That is why it is vital to create an opportune environment that caters to the needs of the intellectual and emotional development of the child.
A Creative Space For Your Child
The child’s environment should support the freedom of the mind and encourage the child’s capacity to comprehend and be creative. This can be easily achieved by creating a platform where the child could express freely through dance, music, art, speech, drama, or anything through which the creative mind satisfactorily expresses. This boosts flexibility of the mind and nurtures the child’s creative capacity.
The child should feel welcome to engage in activities that foster creativity. These activities would be primarily focused on nurturing the child’s originality and cognitive processing. To help the child explore the achievable options, it is always good to offer varying environments and activities that stimulate their visual perception, teach them self control, help them develop and boost their imaginative capacities. These would give the child’s brain an expansive range of possibilities to experiment and learn as it helps their enthusiastic mind to develop interactive and social skills. And along with this, they learn to comprehend and analyse from their experimental ventures.
A study had shown that preschool children aged 3-5 demonstrate more spontaneous creativity than those aged 6 and upwards according to figurative and verbal tests devised by Torrance (1970). This spontaneity is the foundation stone of the child’s basic skills as an adult.
Creativity can be observed in many everyday activities. These are almost always evident when young children are engaged in creating stories in their play. They often tend to create a storyline when they play games. This could involve role-playing or portraying certain characters they are familiar with. This is a reflection of the observation and cognizance of the child. A similar thing is observed when you find these children negotiate disagreements in their play. They explain things to each other making sense of their worlds through conversations trying to showcase a sense of responsibility. Their creativity along with experimentation is observed when they mix colours for a painting. They draw random images on a piece of paper from an existing image in their heads and mix colours to paint it to replicate the image in their head.
For instance, a child who is enthusiastic about words and language as they explore the varied options offered to them to invest their time, could show a creative flair towards literature. As a result, the child could eventually grow out to become a writer or a poet. Also, research has shown that listening to music in the early years can boost the vocabulary of the child.
Why Is It Important?
The creative and cognitive skills of the child are versatile and hence, the growing period of the child is the best time to lay a strong foundation for the physical, emotional and intellectual development.
Also, the constant experimentation in the child’s creative environment helps the child to take risks and improves their ability to make judgments from their experimental lessons. The results from their experiments give them a sense of joy and satisfaction which gives them a positive approach go forth in the feats of their life ahead.
Create an environment where you can monitor your child’s activities and progress can be monitored. This could help you to help and support the child’s imagination and creativity.
