BEYOND GLITTER AND GLUE

You don’t need elaborate craft materials to nurture kids’ creativity. These easy activities will help your child see the world in a fresh way.

BY SUSAN K. PERRY, PH.D.

When most of us think of creativity, we picture arts and crafts projects. But there’s so much more to creativity than paints and crayons, glitter and glue. The ability to think creatively – to come up with new ideas and solutions – helps children work their way through tough problems, be flexible in difficult situations, and develop a tolerance for ideas different from their own. The key to raising a child who thinks ”outside the box” is to treat every day as a creative adventure. Your child may need some guidance in finding ways to see the extraordinary everywhere. Point out the ways in which art is used on billboards or in other advertising. Help your child tune in to nature’s own compositions (the play of light through the trees in a nearby park, for instance). Pay attention to art that people wear as fashion. Start exploring architecture. Notice how many different ways there are to solve the “problem” of roofing, or to bring light and air into space, or to provide entrances. With every real-world investigation, you help broaden your child’s perspective on the nature of creativity.

Consider fostering an appreciation of traditional art. “When my girls look at paintings in a museum or a gallery, or pictures in a book, something usually catches their attention,” says Barbara Dobkin of Los Angeles, a short-story writer, former dancer, and mother of twins. “I’ll say, ‘What do you think that is? Does that picture make you feel anything? Sad, happy, maybe hot?’” Dobkin also makes a point of playing different kinds of music for her children and asking them questions: “Does that music sound like shouting? Does it sound sneaky, or big, or loud?”

Encouraging your child to think about the art she sees and hears helps deepen her understanding of how the creative process works.

MAKING THE MUNDANE MAGICAL

The wonderful thing about your child’s experimental spirit is that you can easily encourage it in a few moments, here and there, even when doing something as ordinary as household chores. Set out each task as a problem to be solved. Ask your child how to do it faster, better, or differently, even if the solutions have to be limited to the imagination. Can your child think of silly ways to get the job done, such as “use a porcupine to dust”? Can he invent a new way to set the table?

Cultivating your child’s originality of thought may take some open-mindedness on your part. For example, when your child has just removed a drawer from the kitchen cabinet to see how the rollers work, or when he’s strung all of his freshly washed clothes around his room to make a life-sized “maze,” praising his cleverness may be the last thing on your mind. Yet such curious real-world explorations signal a form of practical creativity. Some kids who persist in wanting to know how things work will eventually figure out how to make things work better for all of us.

FOSTERING CREATIVITY, AGE BY AGE

Although children are creative by nature, there is much that parents can do to nurture their curiosity and imaginative spirit. The following age-based suggestions will get you started, but feel free to add to your own – and your child’s – inspiration.

Toddlers: Children ages 18 months to 3 years are just learning the “rules,” so avoid making imagination-squelching remarks like “Our house isn’t smaller than a flower.” Avoid jumping to conclusions about your child’s drawings. If you’re not sure what an object is meant to be, say, “Tell me about it.”

  • Give your toddler a pastry brush, a bowl of water mixed with a few drops of food coloring and some scrap paper, and see what she can make. Vary the kind of paper, size of the brush, and colors of the water to keep things interesting.
  • As your toddler begins expanding his vocabulary, have fun playing with language, labels, and humor. Make up silly names for your child and pets, put a sock on your nose and announce, “I’m the sock-nose monster!” or make up a goofy rhyme to go with an everyday activity, something along the lines of “Striving, thriving, hiving, here I go-a-driving.”
  • Give your child a chance to play with her food. Make pancakes in animal shapes by pouring the body first, then adding legs and a head. Let your child use cookie cutters to cut out sandwiches. Your toddler will learn that the same thing can come in many shapes and that it’s fun to do things in different ways.
  • Dance is a perfect activity for younger children because it poses all sorts of creative questions. Ask your 3-year-old to find a way to travel across the room: it’s up to her to decide how she’s going to move, whether she’s going to skip, run, jump, or role. Add music, and your child will delight in finding new movements that correspond to the rhythm.

Preschoolers: Keep your 3-to 6-year-old focused on the process of creating and the idea that anything is possible. Limit your feedback, though; too many comments will only make your child feel self-conscious about her explorations.

  • Introduce the creative possibilities of pretend play by suggesting that he become a robot, an airplane, a boa constrictor, a butterfly, a computer, a spider, the wind, a frog, and, finally, a pair of scissors. He might also enjoy making letters with his body or playing a simple game of charades with you.
  • Ask your child how many different pictures she can see hidden in the wallpaper. Or in a cloud. Or in the leaves on a tree. Press for more than one answer. Young children are open to novelty, so now is the time to help them stretch their imaginations, which encourages them to challenge themselves.
  • Take a walk together down a familiar path, and look for 10 things you’ve never noticed before, from the way potted plants are arranged on someone’s porch to cracks in the street that remind you of a broken eggshell. Your child will discover that, if he tries, it’s possible to find new details in familiar things – and new solutions to familiar problems.

School-age: Children this age are able to take on someone else’s point of view more easily. Suggest activities to enhance interpersonal creativity. Make up a story from the point of view of a nail being hammered, a bed being slept on, a child left out of a party.

  • Take your child to concerts or local musical performances of all kinds, such as those featuring choir, chamber, folk, blues, jazz, and classical music, as well as instrumental solos, traditional music from other countries, and children’s classics. Engage your child in a talk about how the music made her feel or what it made her think about.
  • Have your child paint or draw a picture based on a poem while listening to a piece of music. These multimedia activities show your child how he can come up with fresh ideas by crossing the lines between one art form and another.
  • Discover connections among ideas or images that seem to be unrelated. For instance, make up a story that includes a bear, a toothbrush, and a stop sign. Or write a sentence, a haiku, or a poem using three seemingly unrelated elements. My kids and I played what I call “No Connections”: One of us would name two things that seemed completely different, and then we’d have to find a way to connect them. (Take shoe and broccoli. You could use an old shoe as a container in which to plant broccoli. Or you could go shopping for a pair of shoes that are broccoli-colored.)
  • And finally – even if you do this only once – join your child in creating a big, gooey, gluey, glittery collage.

STORIES FOR SPARKING CREATIVITY

For a creativity booster that doesn’t involve crayons or pretend play or, for that matter, any active movement at all, consider the written word. Tales of artistic and clever protagonists can inspire your child in spirited, inventive ways. Here, five of our favorites that are fun to read aloud.

THE ART LESSON This autobiographical story of a child’s struggles between the regimentation of formal art instruction and his own free artistic expression offers wonderful lessons in individuality, respect for rules – and perseverance. By Tomie dePaola (Putnam, $6, ages 4 to 8).

DRAW ME A STAR Beautiful illustrations enhance this charming twist on the creation story. A young artist begins by making a simple drawing of a star, which asks him to draw a sun, which asks him to draw a tree . . . until the whole world is brought to life, picture by vivid picture. By Eric Carle (Paper Star, $7, ages 4 to 8).

HAROLD AND THE PURPLE CRAYON The story of a little boy who goes out for a walk and draws his own great adventures, this children’s classic (first published in 1955) illustrates the power of the imagination. By Crockett Johnson (HarperCollins, $6, ages 4 to 8).

THE INCREDIBLE PAINTING OF FELIX CLOUSSEAU In this tale of triumph over adversity, a painter is chastised for entering his simple portrait of a duck in the Royal Palace’s art contest. But when the painting comes alive, the painter becomes the focus of much celebration all around the palace. By Jon Agee (Sunburst, $5, ages 4 to 8).

NORMAN THE DOORMAN An art lover by night and a doorman of a mouse hole in a museum by day, Norman enters his sculpture in a museum contest. When he wins, he proves that anything is possible if you want it enough. By Don Freeman (Viking, $6, ages 4 to 8).

CREATIVITY: IT’S NOT JUST FOR KIDS

One surefire way to nurture your child’s imagination is to unleash your own. Try these suggestions, some of which are adapted from my book Writing in Flow: Keys to Enhanced Creativity.

ATTEMPT SOMETHING NEW ONCE A WEEK. You might decide to master 10 words in a foreign language or learn to perform a simple magic trick for the fun of it.

TAKE A NEW ROUTE HOME. Don’t worry if it takes two minutes longer or if there is always traffic in one spot. Even a minor change of scenery can open your eyes and help you see everything in a fresh way.

WRITE A POEM OR A HAIKU (a three-line poem in which the first line is five syllables, the second is seven syllables, and the third is five syllables). If you don’t know what to write about, let your mind wander to find two unrelated words (like raincoat and mouse) and try to work them into the haiku.

PRACTICE OPEN-MINDEDNESS. The next time your first impulse is to say no, think about saying yes. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jane Smiley’s answering-machine message greets callers: “Hello, the answer is yes!” An open attitude provides the impetus to explore new creative avenues.

EXPERIMENT WITH YOUR SENSES. Dress in a color you never wear. Go on a scent walk and count all the smells you’ve never noticed. Walk around your home and really look at each item: See it as though you were visiting from another planet.

IMMERSE YOURSELF IN A DIFFERENT CULTURE. Cook a new ethnic dish, or rent a foreign film you’ve always wanted to see. It’s inspiring to see how many different ways there are to prepare chicken for your family or film a love scene.

THINK OF THREE FAVORITE THINGS THAT YOU SOMEHOW OUTGREW. Did you used to dance around the house? Draw? Paint your toenails crazy colors? Do it again, with or without your child.

REMEMBER TO LAUGH. Buy a joke book and tell the jokes to your friends. Make up tongue twisters. Whether you’re thinking of funny observations about the world around you or swapping knee-slappers with your family, having a sense of humor can turn everyday life into a fresh adventure.

Susan K. Perry, Ph.D., is a social psychologist based in Los Angeles and the author of Playing Smart: A Parent’s Guide to Enriching, Offbeat Learning Activities. You can visit her Web site at .

NOVEMBER 2000 CHILD