The 21st April marks the UN’s World Creativity and Innovation day. In honour of this day, we’ve put together some interesting ways to help build up creativity for your child. Creativity can harness incredible possibilities for children and helps develop their intellect, their imagination and even boosts skills like problem solving.
Here’s our top tips on building creativity at home with your child.
- Find the answer together
Sometimes, children ask questions that we ourselves might need to research and explore. In a situation like this when asked “Why is the sky blue?” or “What’s the deadliest animal in the world?”, you could try saying “Im not sure, let’s find out the answer together”. This shows that seeking out answers is a process which can and should happen at any age. This process helps to develop the child’s ability to think creatively and be curious about the world around them.
- Questions that encourage a conversation
This one could be a great activity to try on the school run or if you’re stuck in traffic and looking for a way to pass the time. Socratic questions as they are sometimes called is where we can ask children open ended questions specifically to help build up creativity. They are a great way to not only develop creative answers and ways of looking and thinking about the world, but they are also lovely to help get to know more about the uniqueness of your child’s personality.Â
You could ask questions like:
-If you could make one rule in the world that everyone had to follow, what would it be?
-Is failure a bad thing or a good thing?
-If you were a teacher and could teach your students anything in the world, what would it be?
They don’t all need to be serious:
-If you could ask any animal in the world a question, what would you ask and which animal would you choose?
-If you could invent anything in the world, what would it be?
- Family stories
Here’s another one to try for long car journeys or just at home. Each member of the family has to join in and tell a story by adding one line at a time. It can be a funny story, a silly story, or even a story with some twists and turns. Storytelling and creating stories is always a very important way to develop imagination and in turn creativity.
- Change the ending of stories
This is an interesting one that can work with children of all ages. It works almost like those, choose your own adventure stories. Once your child has read a story, ask what are some of the different ways the story could have ended. This works just as well if you have just watched a film together. How could the film have ended differently?
One of the easiest ways to develop creativity for your child is to simply ask them what they would enjoy doing. So this World Creativity and Innovation Day, jump in and explore the possibilities of developing creativity with your child today.
