Exploring Your Creative Genius: Episode 162
This week’s show offered a collection of creativity tips you can leverage easily for a nice creative boost.
At the end of the show, I talked about open-endedness. Let’s revisit it with a focus on children in the 6 to 10 age range. Evidence shows that wonderful creative genius 98% display at 4 begins to recede just a few years later. Let’s stop that from happening. Facing an unknowable future, children need to retain and grow their creative qualities.
The best approach to engaging children in this age range is 90% offering an open canvas and 10% an informed playful invitation. With that in mind, you can offer hundreds of variations on this simple structure for indoor open-ended play when you set aside a box, fill it with various odds and ends–a couple of blocks, an old boot, a cup, a broken toy, a ribbon tied in a bow, as examples–and then:
Ask the children to make the weirdest thing they can from those items.
Challenge them to create a game using the items.
Invite them to build a story using the items.
Keep changing the items in the box to refresh play. A similar direction that doesn’t need actual pieces is to announce their favorite playground is being threatened by the Evil Bulldozer and they have a rope, a bag of apples, a drum, and a ladder to use to save the playground. And the next week you can develop a new scenario with new resources.
And yes, for sure, use your best climate control strategies to minimize screen time. I feel a bit sheepish when I say that: my wife and I raised our three daughters before screens took over so we never had to struggle with this challenge like so many of you do. Good luck.
If you have a non-profit, community organization, church group, book club, that would have fun with a 60 or 90-minute free creativity workshop, contact me at carlnordgren14@gmail.com
And you’ve a great chance of winning a copy of my new book, Common Ground for US, when you enter this promotion.
“Exploring Your Creative Genius” takes an expansive view on what it means to be creative and entrepreneurial in an ongoing conversation led by Carl Nordgren — entrepreneur, novelist, and lifelong student with decades of experience growing his own creative capacity and assisting others to do the same in exciting new ways!
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