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Acquiring Imagination and Creative Skills – Simple Parental Techniques and Methods

By Andrew Loh



Many parents come to know and understand that both imagination and creativity can help develop their children's future. With imagination and creativity, your children can become empowered and versatile. An imaginative and creative child can develop focus, attention, and an ability to look at things in a novel way. Imagination in children helps them to understand complicated life situations, solve problems and find solutions to dicey situations.

Imagination and creativity are as important as any other skills of life. Learning these important skills should be a top priority for every parent. Here are some simple tips and techniques that would help your children learning both imagination and creativity.

Experiment! Experiment! Experiment! Experimenting with situations that occur around a child's life, can help her or him to develop intuitive powers like imagination and creativity. Just like Cane and Abel, even imagination and creativity are twin brothers! When your children experiment with things and scenarios around them, they can learn imagination and critical thinking skills very quickly. Let your children act on own. Guide and lead them in the learning process. Failures always succeed experiments! However, repeated failures will enable your children to reach success level very soon.

Examples:

  • Children using crayons to draw and colorize pictures.

  • A small child will try to build homes or shapes by using a stack of painted blocks.

Encourage children: Most children always fail in whatever they do or perform. It is natural for them to fail. You cannot expect children to succeed in everything they do or perform. However, children always look for their parents' support and encouragement when they experience failure. Get ready to encourage your children when they fail. Guide them to taste success in whatever they do or perform.

Examples:

  • When your children draw an unrecognizable image or portrait, praise them for their efforts. Recognize their efforts and complement them.

  • Children often fail when they are trying to solve a board puzzle game. Help your children succeed in solving board puzzles.

Provide new challenges and riddles: Provide unique challenges to your children. Let the challenge be simple and straightforward. Watch them how they face those unique challenges. When they succeed in facing those challenges, provide something new.

Example:

  • Show them how an ordinary roll of toilet paper can be used to make patterns and objects like airplanes and boats.

  • Bring different sets of colorful stacking blocks that allow your children to make new patterns and shapes.

Reserve quality time: Make sure that you are reserving quality time for your children. Quality time means time spent with your children without any disturbance. Ensure that you are allowing your children the liberty of asking questions to you. You may also need to tell fairy stories that prompt them to ask questions to you.

Examples:

  • Fairy stories are some of the most thoughtful tools to develop imagination. They could also help your children develop the power of creativity as well. Provide your children drawing books that contain empty pictures of fairy story characters. Children simply love to paint such pictures by remembering how they looked in the book.

  • Ask your children to recite nursery rhymes and songs by imitating the actions. Involve them in role playing.

Some of the most popular activities that quicken the process of developing imagination and creativity are as follow:

Pretend play: With pretend play, your children can acquire the basic essence of several roles that we see almost every day. Children simply adore playing doctors and teachers in their home. Some children also like to play engineers and pilots. Whatever the plays are, you should encourage them to pretend play with other children.

Reading: You can read out good stories to your young children who do not know how to read. Older children can read books with self effort.

Music: It is the essence of life, and it can help your children develop artistic expressions. Buy small musical instruments for your children.

Mechanical and engineering play sets: Boys simply love to play engineers and architects with such play sets. Playing with such toys will help your children develop critical thinking powers and hand-eye-muscle coordination skills.

Both creativity and imagination are very critical for your children's survival. Acquiring these skills will help your children face all odds and difficulties of life. These skills can strengthen your children's ego and enhance the ability to succeed in life as well. Both imagination and creativity act like beacons of light that lighten up their life. This light will be a permanent beacon for the rest of their life as well.

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Supporting Creativity and Imagination in the Early Years (Supporting Early Learning)
By Bernadette Duffy

Learning through the arts has the potential to stimulate open ended activity that encourages discovery, exploration, experimentation and invention, thus contributing to children's development in all areas of learning and helping to make the curriculum meaningful to them.

Bernadette Duffy draws on her extensive experience of promoting young children's creativity and imagination to examine how visual representations, music, dance, imaginative play and drama can enable children to express their feelings, thoughts and responses. She highlights examples of good practice and provides practical guidance for those working with young children in a variety of settings, including home, school and centre-based care.

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