Whether you’re a teacher, a tutor, or a parent, you’re going to want to do all that you can to encourage and inspire creativity in the children under your care. This can be an uphill battle at times, as children (despite their rich imaginations) often need to be prompted in order to try different and interesting activities. This article will take a look at four of the ways in which you can inspire children to get their creative juices flowing, helping them develop into artists, imagineers, and creatives.
Use Prompts
Prompts can be useful, especially in a classroom context. For instance, let’s say that you’re running an English lesson for your 10-year-old class. You know that they’re bursting with creativity, but you need to give them an idea to latch onto before they start writing. By using a variety of creative writing prompts in your lessons, you’ll be able to stimulate the imaginations of your children, giving them an important anchor point from which to expand their imaginative and creative horizons. Use these prompts in more areas – for instance when children are painting or making up games – to further increase their creativity and imagination.
Uae the Natural World
Children can find great joy in the natural world, just like adults. They can build games with one another, or they can imagine that they are in an adventurous land, having to tackle great challenges and perform great deeds alongside their siblings or classmates. Giving children the freedom to run around in nature – within limits, of course – can help to stimulate their verbal creativity. Allowing their imagination to run riot is a concept that children find easy – but you’ll need to take them somewhere that they can do it in comfort first. Natural areas, such as woodlands or fields, are brilliant places for these activities.
Visit Galleries
Younger children are unlikely to fully appreciate being taken to an art gallery, especially one that doesn’t show art that a young person is likely to be interested in. But slightly older children, perhaps those in their early teens who are forming an aesthetic opinion and personality all of their own, often relish the opportunity to be exposed to a new culture. Whether you accompany your teens or not, buying tickets for them to be exposed to new forms of art can help them develop their own tastes, and their own creative ambitions for later in life.
Use Books
Finally, there’s nothing like sitting quietly with a brilliant book when you’re younger. You may well remember just how much you read when you were young – admittedly, before the smartphone and the internet had taken off. Still, kids today devour books at just the same rate as children did twenty years ago, and this is an important way to develop more creativity and imagination in children. Reading is different from watching films and TV, as it stimulates a different, more imaginative part of the brain, which is why it’s so important for developing creativity in young people.
Make the children in your life feel more creative and inspired with the tips provided in this article.