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Creativity
17 Ways to Foster Creativity in a Practical Kid
Not every child is a budding Picasso—some are Neil deGrasse Tysons-to-be.
Posted April 9, 2017
When your child has just removed a drawer from the kitchen cabinet to see how the rollers work, it may not occur to you to praise her for her creativity. Think about it, though. Most of us find it easy to recognize creativity when we're looking at a carefully arranged collage or a well-written short story.
But there are other kinds of creative intelligence too. Youngsters who excel in what might be called "practical" creativity are particularly curious about the real (physical) world. They want to know how things work. When such an interest persists, some of these kids eventually grow up to figure out how to make things work better.
How do you know if you've got a practical kid? For one, she likes to handle objects, not just look at them, and she'd rather do an experiment than talk about things. When her footstep opens a supermarket door, for instance, she wonders how the electric eye works rather than taking it for granted. She likes so-called "science" toys. Her questions often begin with "How?"
Here are some suggestions for helping such children—any children, really—tune into their real-world passions and make the most of their particular strengths.
17 Ways to Encourage a Budding Engineer or Scientist
1. Equip a kid-friendly "science tool kit" by shopping in a hardware store for a selection of inexpensive items. Considering your child's age, you might Include a hammer, some nails, a screwdriver set, string, scissors, a tape measure, a magnifying glass, magnets, tape, pipe cleaners, rubber bands, and whatever odd things look like they could combine with something else to make an "invention." Ask the clerk for more suggestions. Show your child how to hammer safely, and always supervise a young child when she's working with real tools.
2. Get your child some pulleys, ropes, hooks, and a bucket. Set the stage for experimentation by showing your child how to connect them and suggest an appropriate beam over which to toss the rope. Your child will find that he can fill the bucket with rocks and still lift it easily if he uses a rope and pulley combination.
3. Set aside a box, drawer, or shelf where you put broken household items. Let your child tinker away and pry things apart to see how they work. Include such items as broken toys and trucks, wind-up clocks, flashlights, old telephones, transistor radios, and a videotape and audio cassette tape. (To be safe, first cut off the cord and plug of anything electric.) The very youngest child will also delight in taking apart such non-mechanical items as an envelope, a flower, a bell, and a yo-yo.
4. Maps are a handy way to represent reality in a small space. On large sheets of paper, have your child draw detailed maps of his room, the house, and the neighborhood. Suggest that he decide on a set of symbols to represent trees, hydrants, water, power lines, and so on. Get your child a compass and show him how to find north and mark it on his maps. Show him a flat map of the world and compare it to a globe. Talk about scale and explain that an inch can represent a block or a mile or 50 miles.
5. With your child, devise a variety of special races. Here are some examples: Let the air out of two balloons simultaneously and race them. Roll two round objects (ball, marble) down an incline and see which one reaches bottom first. Drop two leaves while standing on a chair. After each race, talk about variables to try and explain what happened.
6. Children enjoy scavenger hunts, including designing them. First help him make a list of odds and ends that might be found around the house and yard, such as a leaf, feather, piece of cardboard, rubber band, plastic twist tie, flower petal, piece of string, and so on. At the end, see what he can make by combining come or all of the items.
7. Have your child brainstorm six new ways to tie a shoe. Let him try out his methods. How would he tie a shoe with only one hand? What if shoelaces came in sets of three?
8. Buy a copy of The Way Things Work Now: From Levers to Lasers, Windmills to Wi-Fi, a Visual Guide to the World of Machines, a 400-page illustrated book, revised and updated, by David Macaulay with Neil Ardley (originally published in 1988). This intriguing book both tells and shows clear explanations for every kind of machine. Readers (or pre-readers with parental help) learn what goes on inside a door lock as it's being unlocked, how a can opener uses its toothed wheels as gears to get the turning force of the handle to where it is useful, how a vacuum cleaner uses air pressure, all the digital stuff (music, TV, GPS), up to showing the insides of a nuclear reactor. (Even I kept thinking, "Cool!")
9. What would your child take with him for a month on a desert island? Ask for realistic reasons for each choice. Prompt with questions such as, "How would you prepare food?", "How would you go to the bathroom?", and "What could you take that would help you get off the island?"
10. For the child with an interest in vehicles, provide plenty of materials to design creative versions of these vehicles. One 5-year-old likes to make "airplanes" out of elaborate combinations of large boxes and chairs. How about designing a cockpit, a pit stop for a race car, or a train station out of furniture, sheets, and odds and ends?
11. Kids can design miniature see-saws. A see-saw is a kind of lever. Demonstrate how to place a piece of wood, such as a ruler or yardstick, on a fulcrum (the pivot point, a small non-round object). Have your child experiment with balancing objects of different weight on each end of the see-saw by moving the fulcrum closer to one end or the other.
12. Ask your child to design a contraption in which each part acts on the next in some way. For example, he might balance an incline (a ruler) on some blocks. When he rolls a marble on the incline and it falls down, it lands in a paper cup that is itself balanced precariously. When the cup falls, make something else happen.
13. A life-size maze can be concocted in a bedroom or the yard. Gather string, blankets, boxes, chairs, and so on, and suggest that your child design a zigzag course for you, a sibling, or a friend to walk or crawl through when she's done.
14. Find an old chair and invite your child to turn it into something else by decorating it, gluing odd parts onto it, or, if feasible, taking it apart and putting it together in an imaginative way. Talk about other common objects that can be re-purposed similarly, with no limits on imagination.
15. How about creating an art work that responds to touch, wind, or gravity? Your child could combine small discs of any material, strings, buttons, pieces of wood, and so on. These can be arranged in some kind of frame, or hung up in the form of a mobile. Search garage sales or flea markets in search of suitable found objects to include in the artwork.
16. Make up a silly game, using mallets, balls of various kinds, boxes, or any household object or toy that inspires an idea. Part of the fun for your child will be deciding on the rules for her made-up game.
17. It takes creative powers to come up with directions for "10 Ways Not to..." do or make something. For instance, say he's just learned to build a sand castle. He can list everything that can be done wrong while building a sand castle ("Start with dry sand. Build a 20-foot structure. Sit on the castle to tamp down the sand.")
Above all, have fun together exploring the boundlessness of the imagination, as well as the limits of the physical world.
Copyright (c) 2017 by Susan K. Perry, author of Playing Smart and the novel Kylie's Heel
