Creating creativity

• Allow time for dreaming, thinking, planning, imagining.
• Provide the tools and the medium.
• Ask open-ended questions.
• Show that there’s more than one right way to do things and more then one way to solve a problem.
• Provide an audience.

Try…

• A large cardboard box and fat markers – is it a car, a space rocket or a cubby house?
• Tell stories – from adult to child and vice versa.
• Keep a dress-up box – one way to recycle eighties fashion!
• They’re never too young to learn to cook – start them on mixing muffins, it’s all about measuring.
• Don’t buy birthday cards – buy sheets of coloured card from the craft shop in different textures, cut contrast shapes and glue.

To make a paper mache solution:

• Mix PVA glue with water to the consistency of light cream.
• Tear strips of newspaper (or sheets of coloured tissue) about 5cm wide and dip into the mixture.
• Use fingers so that the strips aren’t sopping wet.
• Blow up a balloon and drape the strips over and around.
• When the mache is dry, pop the balloon and paint with white paint to hide the newsprint, before using colours to make a face.

Website

Art Teacher on the Net – a site chock full of ideas for parents and children to enhance creativity.  Lots of free art activity ideas, projects, art history information, traditional and cultural craft ideas.

This article was first published in Australian Family Magazine, September 2001.