DIY Ideas to Boost Children’s Creativity
Stop worrying about test scores and achievements in school! Let children discover, explore, play, and encourage their creativity. The early development of children’s creativity is more important than you can ever imagine.
Yes, Creativity Trumps Everything
We live in a fast paced digital world where mastering a specific skill set is inadequate, or in my favorite sing-song phrase of the past year “never enough”. The world needs more than just learning by the book. It needs ‘street’ smarts, or the ability to think on your feet, improvise, and come up with out-of-the-box ideas. So, how are you going to boost your children’s creativity?
Let’s Juice Up Our Creativity With Some DIY Ideas!
DIY allows children to grow emotionally and physically through sensory exploration of the world around them. This makes it ideal for boosting children’s creativity. Here are a few ideas to try:
Scralphabet – oh no I didn’t! Yes, I did. I combined the ‘scrap’ with ‘alphabet’ to coin this awesome name. This idea develops dexterity which is important to any and all tactile skills. Let them glue/tape scraps of paper or fabric to a book where you draw out larger than life letters for them or giant cardboard cutouts of the alphabets. You could even have them build collages or dioramas.
Pin Up Letters – for this DIY activity you just need simple wooden pins for hanging up your laundry. Let your children paint on all the letters of the alphabet on the pins. Have them decorate them with designs, colors, or even animals to make it more fun for them. You can then make games or activities for them to spell different words.
Bubble Wrap Paint – pretty much self-explanatory. We all tend to have bubble wrap packaging lying around in a drawer or cabinet somewhere. Get it all out and let your kids go ham with different colors of paints. They can then cut them out or push blank sheets of paper down onto them to make their own modern art. Who knows?! Maybe you can sell them off for millions to a museum.
Obstacle Course – boosting children’s creativity should also involve a little more exertion than indoor activities allow. Get them outside and running. Another positive of this is that you’ll tire them out and they’ll tend to be easier to get to bed. So what’s the idea? Hopefully you have an outdoor area like a yard or field. Use whatever you can find like chairs, sofas, tables, pool noodles, inflatable pools to make as awesome an obstacle course as you can. Time their runs and make give them prizes for beating their own time.
micro:Jackolantern – it’s Halloween! Get digital and let your children use the micro:bit to make your very own digital Jackolantern. They can make the pumpkin out of cardboard or any other household materials you have lying around, and code it to make any face you want. What’s spookier than a glowing red robotic face?! For more DIY ideas for your micro:bit, click here.
Boosting Children’s Creativity Everywhere!
Thankfully, educational institutions, or the powers that be, are finally recognizing that boosting children’s creativity is important to their development and have started to implement changes in the classroom.
And! What’s super exciting is that they see that creativity can be in all parts of education! It’s no longer limited to Language, art, or music. You can find schools emphasizing creativity in all the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects, which is why they’ve added the A for arts to make it STEAM. So, this summer break get DIYing and boost your child’s creativity while engaging and entertaining them at the same time.