Children are naturally creative

It’s amazing to watch children as they develop their creativity. It evolves so naturally for them, and the younger the children, the less inhibited they are. As I reflect over the past few weeks, I smile at some of the creativity that I’ve observed.

Every year our school hosts a Saturday Fall Faire, in which classes host a myriad of games, activities or projects for families to enjoy. The booth my first-grade class hosted was making cornhusk dolls. The children started with wet cornhusks, and after making a basic shape for the body, they began gathering supplies to develop personalities for their cornhusk dolls. In a very short time, they were making custom clothing and accessories out of fabric scraps. There was a groom, all decked out in tuxedo and bow tie for his upcoming wedding, and a skier with winter hat and mittens. A princess emerged, in addition to what might have been perceived as a servant. As their creations continued, the children’s imaginations grew. The cornhusk dogs started barking, which scared the cornhusk horse into a gallop. Stories were forming, with characters, plot and settings.

Last week, I told the students the Russian tale of “Masha and the Bear,” about a little girl who tricked a bear into taking her back to her grandparents’ home in a basket that he thought was just filled with pies. To re-enact the story, the students began making the characters out of beeswax and soon we had bears, baskets, pies and very fertile imaginations figuring out how to re-tell the story.

Another example of evolving creativity happened before a recent school day started. The students were working on geoboards, and each child had two rubber bands, which were used to stretch around little pegs to make geometric shapes. They were exploring the concepts of basic shapes, symmetrical shapes and transformational shapes. The creations they were making were phenomenal for a group of first-graders. There were rubber-band houses, pieces of pizza, mountains and arrows. All of a sudden, one of the boys discovered that, if you make a half circle, it looks like a bow. If you use the other rubber band to make an arrow, you could have a bow and arrow. And then, of course, another level of creativity set in. It was important to see if the arrow could actually fly! This quickly emerged into exploring which kind of rubber band made the arrow fly farther. All of this evolved in the few minutes that it took for me to have a parent conversation at the back of the room. School hadn’t even started yet, and the students’ creativity was already getting warmed up for the day.

Given some recycled boxes, tape, glue, crayons, paper or other common household materials, their imaginations take them to faraway lands, to stories recently told or to wherever their imaginations want to go. Given basic scarves or pieces of fabric, children become characters, either creating their own story or retelling one they’ve heard or read.

I also enjoyed watching how creativity was evolving in our writing center last week. Our emerging writers have many stories to tell, so we have a stack of homemade blank books available. The front and back covers are sheets of construction paper, and there are four pages in each book. The students love to use these to create their own stories. Within the past couple of weeks, though, the students have passed over the premade books, preferring to gather the supplies to create their own. They love the idea of stapling their own books together (with the rule of only using three staples on the side) and knowing that they created the whole book. Of course, as with anything else, it takes practice to learn new things, so it wasn’t too much of a surprise when a student who was making his first book gathered his supplies, put his book together and stapled both sides shut. There was some additional creative problem solving to figure out what to do so he could open it!

The ability to create is truly a gift, and one that should be nurtured. This is supported by copious amounts of brain research. We need creative thinkers and creative problem solvers. Children are naturally curious and creative when they are young. Let’s do what we can to continue to nurture their creativity.

Diana Sloan-Basner is a teacher at Birchtree Charter School.