Family Matters

Last week, I posted ways to boost creativity in kids and gave 5 tips to help kids with their creativity. Today, I will cover 5 more tips to boost creativity.

Creativity can be learned at any stage in life, at any age and under any circumstances. To boost your kids' creativity, you, as a parent, can boost yours. Remember: "Creative parents raise creative kids". Use the ideas posted here to refresh your parenting style. If you want your kids to step up and be special and unique, you need to be special and unique too in the way you parent your kids.

5 ways to boost your creativity

Find objects in the clouds

Looking in the clouds and searching for animals, people and other objects improves your imagination and creativity. The brain is a pattern-matching machine and the more you use this matching mechanism the better you get at it.

Cloud gazing is an easy, cheap way to encourage creativity. Just sit or stand outside, look at the sky and try to give meaningful names to shapes in the clouds. When you find something, try to explain what you see to the people around you until they can see it too (finding and explaining are two different skills). Never belittle what your kids see in the clouds.

The same activity is excellent when looking at the stars.

Encourage kids to be creative about failure

When they do not succeed at something, teach them there are no failures, only opportunities to learn. Tell them about Thomas Edison, who was famous for trying again and again and again until he managed to invent and improve many things (not only the light bulb) by telling himself that every unsuccessful event only brought him closer to his discovery.

Have a treasure box

Encourage your kids to have a treasure box and collect things that interest them - toys, notes, photos, ideas… From time to time, ask them to look at their treasure box and invent a kid with that collection. They can write down the story of this kid. Give them ideas for things to write about, like his age, why he collected those items, where he lives, what his dreams were, what he loved doing and so on.

This activity will stimulate your kids' imagination as they try to write about someone who is different to them. By doing this, they will think of different reasons kids may have for collecting the same items.

When your kids grow older, buy them a folder and a notebook with pockets and tell them to collect things and ideas or thoughts they may use later on in life. When they are young, they will more likely to collect items and as they grow older, they can write more.

Make up stories about people

This is a game we play when we stand in a queue for a long time. We look at people and try to guess the nature of the relationships between them, what happened to them just before they came to where we saw them, their occupation, their family status and so on. It can be a lot of fun and there are no right or wrong stories. This is just a way to exercise our imagination.

What if

Play with your kids the "What if?" game. This game moves kids (and their parents) from seeing themselves subject to circumstances to leading themselves through the journey of life with intention and purpose. It sparks and legitimizes desires. Although some of the imagined situations may never happen, it still requires creativity to imagine them. We play "What if?" whenever we want to motivate our kids. Some of the games are more realistic, like "What would I do if I didn't have to go to school?" while others are not realistic, like "What would I do if I had 4 hands?"

Here is a list that will help you boost creativity by playing "What if?" This is just some examples; you can come up with anything you wanted.

What if questions

1. If I could go back in time, I would…
2. If people could travel in time…
3. If I had all the money I wanted, I would…
4. If I could meet one person from the history, it would be…
5. If I could change the world, I would…
6. If I had 4 hands, I would…
7. If I had to spend 1 million dollars in one week, I would spend it on…
8. If I could invent any machine I wanted, it would be…
9. If we discovered a good place to live in space…
10. If people could live to be 300 years…
11. If kids didn't have to go to school…
12. If I could have 3 wishes, they would be…
13. If we had world war 3…
14. If people could move from one place to the other just by thinking about it…
15. If we could bring back dead people…
16. If I were an animal, I would be…
17. If people could read minds…
18. If I could win the noble prize, it would be for…
19. If I could be famous, I would be famous for…
20. If I could speak 5 languages…
21. If we didn't have TV…
22. If people could choose to stop growing in a curtain age, the best age would be…
23. If the whole world would speak one language…
24. If people could learn while sleeping…
25. If people in the world were allowed to have only one kid…
26. If I could be in any physical condition, I would…
27. If people could eat tablets without having to eat food…
28. What if we could remember everything that happened to us…
29. What if I could breath under water…
30. If people lived in the sky…
31. If I could wake up in the morning knowing how to play a musical instrument, it would be…
32. If I was a magician…
33. If time stood still, I would…

Art

Explore art as a creative tool. From an early age, encourage your kids to try any form of art: sculpting, writing, drawing, painting, building, designing… There are many forms of art, so kids can always find something that interests them. For example, if your kids love horses, they can sculpt, write, draw and paint horses or they can design a home for them.

Most art forms focus on creativity and personal interpretation of situations and external stimulants. Young kids' art usually involves copying, but with full acceptance of individuality. I worked with 4-year-olds on art when the object they needed to copy was the same and even the ingredients were similar and each kid created something different. When kids get permission to do things their own way, and I think most art teachers focus on this, they become more creative, because they are allowed. If you choose to be your kids' art teacher yourself, accept any outcome.

The more you expose your kids to art, the more creative they will be.

Join me next week with 2 more big ideas to boost creativity in kids. In the meantime, feel free to tell me what you think or share ideas that have encouraged your kids' creativity in the comment box below.

Happy, creative parenting!
Ronit

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