Nurturing your childs Creativity

Creativity is at the epicentre of human exploration and discovery. Creativity is a force that nurtures human development, innovation and helps us appreciate nature around us. Everyone is creative. Being creative helps children to look within themselves, take a pause and helps them to calm down.

Below are a few ways to nurture your child’s creative ideas and imaginative spirit:

1. Encourage possibility thinking: Pose the “What if?” question in front of your child in as many ways as possible; these help children naturally think of creative possibilities for everything they encounter.
2. Nurture your child’s interests: Allow your children to choose their after-school activities. Encourage them to more deeply explore those activities in essays and projects at school.
3. Expand the language of emotion: Being able to understand and describe emotions is critical to the creative process. Help them with the emotional vocabulary so that they can express their feelings better.
4. Play, play, play: Through imaginative play, children explore their ideas and create meaning about the world around them. It is better to provide all kinds of art supplies - crayons, play dough, construction paper, glitter to your child so that (s)he can create freely.
5. Explore the beauty of nature: The natural world inspires children to think, question, make suppositions, instil problem-solving skills, and develop creative minds. Children can draw in the sand, make designs with twigs, build forts with branches, or simply lie on the ground and look up at the sky.
6. Advocate for the daydreamer: When kids daydream, they explore associations, make connections, and search for possibilities. Daydreaming and a bit of solitude for reflection are among the attributes of highly creative people.
7. Invent scenarios: Invent scenarios with your child. This way (s)he will try on lots of different roles and organise his/her thoughts while developing social and verbal skills. Encourage your child to play house, doctor, zoo, farm, space station, school, or store.
8. Verbal activities: From rhymes to riddles (check our rhymes and riddles content to get you started), silly sounds to phonics, games such as "I Spy" (and many more activities on our app), verbal interactive activities can inspire and nurture creative minds.
9. Encourage art activities: Through painting, sculpture, collage, clay, drawing or any other medium, art is a way for children to work through emotions, make decisions, and express their ideas.
10. Ask open-ended and thought-provoking questions: Asking questions that provoke imaginative and creative thinking is an effective way to invite your child to express his/her ideas and share his/her visions. "What do you think would happen if….?" "What's the difference between a dog and a cat?" "What are some other ways to do this?" are a few questions to get you started.
11. Limit screen time: Nurturing imagination and parenting in the digital age can be tough. Focusing on a screen is a passive way of learning for children. Engaging children in a kinesthetic manner using their entire bodies and their five senses helps in deep learning and also opens up their minds.
12. Remember to allow for downtime: Unstructured, unscheduled time allows children opportunities to imagine and create.
13. Limit electronic toys: Electronic toys don’t engage a child’s imagination and so children are simply better off playing with a basic wooden toy.
14. Ask questions about their creations: Kids have their own thought processes, and we can’t always see what they are thinking just by looking at something they’ve made. Ask them what they have created to help them articulate their process and the ideas behind what they thought of creating and what they ended up creating.
15. Respect: Respecting that each child has the right to be himself/herself and believing in his/her uniqueness builds your child’s confidence. Respect his/her imagination and fantasies.
16. Base on Values Not Rules: Too many rules hinder creativity. If you let your children decide their behaviour according to those values, creativity will flourish.

Here are some examples of comments that nurture the creative environment:

• “It’s fun to try it different ways”
• “Tell me about it”
• “Let’s try it anyway”
• “Have you thought of any alternatives?”
• “I see you are having a lot of fun”

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