All children are different and unique in their capabilities, skills, and talents. However, one thing that all these little humans have in common is their inbuilt quality of being imaginative and innovative. Their perception is rich in creativity, though, over time, some tend to lose this precious gift or stop using it altogether due to diversions like digital screens or other sources of entertainment that fail to inspire their ingenuity.
When parents observe these impediments in their child’s development, they should intervene and create experiences that inspire their children to be more artistically expressive. The following piece provides parents with tips to help their kids be more creative and nudge them in the right direction.
Create a Family Art Studio within the House
Children love the notion, ” The more, the merrier.” If you wish to have your child thrilled about an activity, you have to join in and be just as excited! Turn a small room in the house into an art gallery or a studio where the family members are the Pablo Picasso and Vincent Van Gough of this small art world.
Redecorate the room a little to give it that aesthetic feel. You can achieve the gallery look by hanging up sceneries and attractive pictures with vivid colors, available online. You can look up Dreamstime stock photos for affordable and excellent-quality images.
Prop up a few canvases and stock up on affordable art supplies like paint palettes, brushes, posters, oil paints, and voila! You have yourself a mini art studio. Use this space to come together a few times a week. Hand your children the paintbrushes and paints, turn on some fun tunes and ask them to paint how they imagine the sounds look. This activity is also a favorite among teachers to inspire imagination in children.
Let Nature be the Muse
Nature helps boost mental health and imagination while improving motor and cognitive development. The American Society of Pediatricians has verified these claims through extensive research.
Digging their fingers in the mud and walking over grass blades is an inspiring and liberating experience for children. Take your kids for a stroll in a green space and let their primitive instincts take the lead. You will observe how they take in every small detail and ask intriguing questions regarding the various phenomena they witness outdoors. Urge them to ask you as many questions as they can think.
Ask them some open-ended questions too, like, how many kinds of flowers did you see? Do you know the shape of the leaves on that tree? This will encourage them to explore the surrounding even more. It helps stir their creativity by absorbing intricate details like the different kinds of flowers with eye-catching color combinations and delicate patterns and the overall scenery that the trees, plants, and birds provide.
Allow the children to explore the grounds and hand them twigs, stones, leaves, and a scoop of good old mud. Create objects using these natural materials, such as a pot, a carriage, or a figure. This will enhance fine motor skills in the children and develop critical thinking.
You can make this experience more fun-packed and artistic by collecting several kinds of fallen leaves. Take your nature collection back to the studio, paint them in vibrant colors and place them all in a transparent vase to create a showpiece.
Dress up to tell a Story
Why wait for Halloween to have fun with costumes? Ask your children what characters they would like to become. Print out pictures of their chosen characters, hand them the image along with a basket, and instruct them to scan the house to look for things they can use to create their costumes. Help them out through suggestions.
According to EYFS, children who are allowed some level of control and decision-making power develop self-assurance and confidence to make decisions and exercise strategic thinking to overcome challenges and obstacles by creating solutions.
So by allowing your children to partake in this chaotic yet fun activity, you are promoting multiple developmental and recreational skills in them. Once the hunt is complete, help your children assemble their costumes and tell them a story plot. Ask them to add their ideas and dialogues to continue the storyline and enact it like a play. You will be surprised by how diverse and lively their imagination can be. The setting would be more beneficial with a cheering audience present to witness their masterpiece and make their hard work all the more worth it. It will also make them want to perform such activities more often.
Become Chefs for the Day
To be artistic, you need to be familiar with different textures, colors, and compositions, and more importantly, you require inspiration. The best place to teach your children about all these aspects is your home food lab, the kitchen. Take your children to the kitchen and let them have some hands-on experience with the ingredients. You can choose easy yet interesting and colorful recipes like pancakes and fruit salad.
While assisting them through the process, make sure to give an introduction to everything they come across. Explain to them the change in the composition of the batter from dry ingredients to liquid form, and inform them of different ways you can use the syrup and cut up fruits to decorate the pancakes. Let the children do most of the steps independently to enhance their creative skills and keep them indulged.
Such tasks stimulate the farthest parts of a child’s inventiveness, and they can apply these newly learned techniques and tricks in similar situations.
Play with Melody
Nothing says creativity and entertainment as music! What makes it more interesting is to make music with anything but the instruments. It provides children with the opportunity to do something that is a dream come true for any young one, to make noise.
Gather household items like pots, pans, and wooden spoons, play drums with them, sing a favorite poem, or create your own songs. The musical activity improves children’s memory and allows them to learn rhythms and tunes.
Children have a higher observance power than adults, which enables them to discern tiny details from these activities and learn to create pieces of music through constant practice. If your child finds music fascinating, you can always promote their artistic flair by providing them with instruments of their choice to achieve prowess.
Take Away
Creativity and imagination are precious qualities that make life more colorful and fascinating. All it takes to nurture that part of development in a child is a little attention. Encouragement by the parents to explore their potential and create new ways to express their emotions leads to the child’s healthy mental state and developed creative skills.
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