Encouraging Your Kids to Be Creative
Kids are naturally creative. Just give them a box. They’ll do everything but think inside it. So why should we expend any of our precious mental energy encouraging them to do this thing that comes naturally? I would venture that our kids have had many of their creative efforts crushed, dismissed, or tested out of them. Let’s talk about ways to encourage creativity in kids.
Creativity involves ways of imagining in new and novel forms. We traditionally associate creativity with the arts, but creative expression can be seen in ingenious solutions to problems across a spectrum of careers. Creativity can be cultivated. It is not a characteristic that your child is born either with or without.
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Character Trait of the Month List
Each month, as part of our homeschool learning, I focus on a specific character trait. There are many character traits worth pursuing, but given the time frame of the school year, I narrowed my list down to ten.
3 Simple Ways to Encourage Creativity
Here are three ways you can begin encouraging your child to practice creativity today.
PROVIDE INSPIRATION + EXAMPLES
First, provide an atmosphere that fosters creative thinking. Read books expansively. Brainstorm ideas with a focus on the process rather than coming up with the “right” one. Look for examples of creative thinking everywhere you go and point them out to your kids. Someone had to come up with the idea for the Post-It note, right? Expose them to a variety of music, art, books, film, sport, technology, and nature.
GIVE THEM TIME + STRUCTURE
Second, provide your kids with time to imagine and structure to create. Many artists and authors will say that creation is not a matter of waiting for inspiration to strike, but rather a habit of doing the work of creation even when it’s hard. If your kids have plenty of inspiration and examples of creative thinking, they need some level of downtime to allow their brains to process things they’ve read, heard, or seen and make connections between them.
We sometimes get caught up in wanting our kids to be actively “doing” something at all times, but spending 30 minutes staring at a tree is not wasted time. Allow for unstructured time to daydream and imagine, while also providing structured guidance for developing ideas. If your child is interested in learning to draw, offer books or video drawing tutorials. Staring at a blank page is a tough place for anyone to create.
Encourage them to start with an example or inspiration and then to feel free to make changes, go a different direction, or otherwise put their individual stamp on their creations.
EMBRACE MISTAKES
Third, make it clear that mistakes are valued tools of learning. Put greater emphasis on trying than succeeding. Emphasize the process and effort involved over the “you’re so smart” comments. Kids who are afraid to fail will be afraid to try. Recognize and share your own mistakes. Laugh at yourself and talk about what you’ve learned from your own failures. Share stories of famous failures. Leave no doubt that mistakes are part of growth that teach valuable lessons if we reflect on and learn from them.
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Exploring Creativity with Quotes and Questions
Here are a few quotes about creativity, along with questions you can use to engage your kids in conversation or use as a writing assignment or journal prompt.
You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.
Maya Angelou
Question: Do you agree? Have you experienced this in some way? Can you think of any examples of this in other people?
To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.
Joseph Chilton Pearce
Question: How is fear connected to creativity? Should we try to lose our fear of being wrong? If so, what can we do to lose that fear?
Make an empty space in any corner of your mind, and creativity will instantly fill it.
Dee Hock
Question: Does this quote resonate with you? How could you make space for creativity?
Every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of one or more previous ideas.
Austin Kleon
Question: Do you agree? If so, how does this reasoning influence how you think about your own creative abilities? If you disagree, can you give an example of a completely new idea with no elements of previous creative thought?
More Creativity Quotes
Here are a few additional quotes about creativity you may wish to consider as alternatives, or use in addition to the four above. These quotes don’t necessarily use the word creativity, but the ideas behind these quotations are related to the same concept.
Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.
Albert Einstein
When you can do a common thing in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world.
George Washington Carver
To have a great idea, have a lot of them.
Thomas Edison
Inspiration does exist, but it must find you working.
Pablo Picasso
Creativity News Articles and Reports
Here are a few sources for news articles containing stories of curiosity. One way to teach curiosity to kids is to show them specific examples of it in action.
Science News for Students
The website sciencenewsforstudents.org is a great resource for science-related news articles written specifically for kids.
How Creativity Powers Science: Article describing the role of creativity in solving scientific problems.
Nobel Goes for Creating the Nanoscope: Group of three scientists does something the general scientific community thought was impossible.
DOGO News
Another source for kid-friendly news articles is dogonews.com
LEGO’s Home of the Brick Delights Fans: Fun article describing the creatively inspired LEGO House in Denmark.
Can Unconventional Playgrounds Make Kids More Creative?: Company launches unique free play playground designs to encourage creative play.
Books that Explore Creativity
These books explore the theme of curiosity through engaging stories. The Dot by Peter Reynolds is a beautiful picture book about the creative spirit. Let’s Make Faces by Hanoch Piven encourages kids to look at objects in creative ways. The Art Book for Children from Phaidon Press provides an introduction to famous works of art with commentary about how to appreciate art. The Creativity Project by Colby Sharp is a collection of poems, stories, art, and more provided by children’s book creators using story starters from each other. The book includes a section of extra story starters for the reader to continue the creative process.
Short Video Content Related to Creativity
These links are videos I added to my kids’ Google classrooms in October to get them thinking about creativity.
We Need a Bigger Definition of Creativity (YouTube – John Spencer): Short video expanding the definition of creativity.
The Power of Creative Constraints (YouTube – TedEd): Great video for older kids to think about why creativity is actually enhanced by limitations.
Creative Thinking: How to Increase the Dots to Connect (YouTube – Sprouts): Discussion of different types of creative thinking, and how to increase our ability to think creatively.
Movies with a Creativity Theme
Toy Story is a creative masterpiece where toys come to life and come up with creative solutions to their problems.
Robots tells the story of a young inventor who chases his dream in the big city.
The Pixar Story is a documentary that goes behind the scenes at one of the most creative filmmaking companies in the world.
Encouraging Creativity in Kids with Activities
Try some of these ways to develop creativity in your child.
MAKER SPACE
Provide a variety of materials your kids can use to make and create or use in free play. Many toys offered today are specific to pretending to be a Star Wars Jedi or Disney Princess. Kids don’t play as much with sticks and cardboard, and they miss out on the creative inspiration that comes from making an object be whatever they want it to be. You’ll find a list of items you may wish to include in a maker space in my Maker Monday Activity Bundle.
FIX THINGS TOGETHER
Include your kids in the process when their bike has a flat tire or a button comes off their shirt. They can be involved in finding substitutions for recipe ingredients or finding an appropriate object to use when a game piece is missing. Give them as many opportunities as possible to see that they are capable of coming up with ways to fix something that is broken.
LET THEM PROBLEM SOLVE
Ask your kids to come up with ideas to solve problems that are relevant to them. They can brainstorm ideas for keeping their toys organized, their own chore system, or how to remember whose turn it is to pick a movie. Have your kids work through how to arrange their belongings in a shared room, or let them decide on a method for storing their books.
In many cases, you will need to provide some creative constraints, but these will only work to provide a starting point for their creative solutions.
Scriptures to Encourage Creativity
The Bible begins with a story of creation from a Creator God in which God claims that we humans are created in his image. It seems clear from what we know of human history that people are capable of impressive creative endeavors. We can use our creative minds to add to the beauty and loveliness of our world and by doing so, tune our eyes and hearts to sing his praise.
So God created mankind in his own image…
Genesis 1:27 (NIV)
He has filled them with skill to do all kinds of work as engravers, designers, embroiderers in blue, purple and scarlet yarn and fine linen, and weavers—all of them skilled workers and designers.
Exodus 35:35 (NIV)
For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
Ephesians 2:10 (NIV)
Free Printable Creativity Quotes and Questions
By subscribing to my mailing list, you have access to my printables library, where you can download a free printable list of these four quotes and accompanying questions. Use them as discussion questions, a writing assignment, or journal prompts.
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Encouraging Creativity in Kids
The best way to encourage creativity in kids is of course to make it a part of your daily life. Explore new ideas together, learn together, ask open-ended questions, and let them have plenty of unstructured play. Provide inputs from great books, art, and music. Creativity requires knowledge to build upon. Open your eyes to wonder at the marvelous creation and Creator alike.
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October Character Trait Focus: Creativity
