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The childhood years of every kid are the most crucial years of their learning and development that also help them in exploring their dislikes and interests in many ways.
One of the most essential aspects of early childhood development is creative thinking. A child’s talents can be improved physically, socially, intellectually, and emotionally through imagination and creativity exercises. It is one of the most important factors in creating self-expression. Children can enjoy expressing their ideas through shapes, sounds, and colors with the support of creativity. Problem-solving and critical thinking abilities are also encouraged through creative learning.
Creativity is often mistaken to be a natural talent one is born with. However, any child can seek this ability to an extent if some activities are put into practice at both home and school level, to boost and foster children’s creative thinking capability at a young age. Children are natural innovators with vivid imaginations, and creativity can bring along several intellectual, emotional, and even health advantages for them.
Let’s understand Why Creativity Is Important for Children
Creativity fosters several abilities in kids, like the capacity to generate new ideas, the ability to be distinctive and one-of-a-kind, and the ability to think beyond the box. Also, there are several advantages of nurturing a child’s creative ability.
- Social Communication – One of the most essential advantages of planning creative development activities for children is that it helps your child develop social communication skills. The thinking ability develops the desire in children to ask questions and convey their thoughts, thus making them great communicators.
- Build Relationships and Express – One of the finest ways to express ourselves is via creativity. As your kid grows older, the usage of art and craft offers them a secure method to socialize with other children. It teaches them how to form relationships, how to collaborate with one another and thus helps them to learn how to express their feelings better.
- Boost Analytical Thinking – With a creative mindset, kids can grow to become innovative in ways to complete tasks, solve issues, and overcome obstacles. They can develop unique and unconventional viewpoints for their work.
- Broad Thinking Mindset – When children are creative, they see the world in a different way. Creative thinking liberates children to lay aside any preconceived notions or biases they may have and look at things in a whole new light.
- Problem Solving Ability – The usage of pencils, crayons, and paintbrushes encourages children to think of a new creation that helps them develop their critical thinking ability. Creative thinking evolves children from just thinking straight to brainstorming on diverse ideas, thus bringing solutions or answers to their problems. With this children develop the problem solving ability that helps them boost their own confidence in the most natural way.
- Develop interest in S.T.E.M. – Creative play helps children become intellectually powerful. Many kids tend to lose interest in subjects of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics due to the understanding difficulty. Planning creative activities can develop new ways of thinking, thus building an interest in children for these subjects and making academic learning more enjoyable.
How do you Develop Creative Thinking in Children?
A child equally learns and grasps new things at home as much as they do at school. Creative thinking can be fostered in children by involving numerous self-creation tasks in their day-to-day life at both school learning levels as well in their personal space at home. Below mentioned are a few activities that can help uplift the creative thinking in your child.
1. Make a creative space for your kids
Designate a small area inside or outside your house where your child feels free to create and play as they want. This empowers them to explore and innovate new things as per their ideas and helps in building a sense of confidence in themselves.
2. Involve them in little household activities
Your kids will learn a lot from the little activities of household work that you may think your kids are too small to do. You can involve them in small activities like arranging the fruit basket or some harmless kitchen utensils, watering the plants as per their names, or arranging their closet as per the color of clothes. Activities like these can boost a sense of creativity and confidence in them. They may not do it with 100% perfection but it makes them feel responsible and involved in your work, and you can always make it right in the end.
3. Involve them in little cooking activities
This may sound like a call for chaos and danger. However, planning simple and easy cooking activities with your kids can aid in teaching them important lessons and also push them to think creatively, indulge in problem solving, and also help learn discipline and time management.
4. Gift Creation
Avoid the idea of purchasing a present on behalf of your kid, to gift any of your relatives, friends, or family members, instead sit with your kid to have them make a gift for them. This creates plenty of room for your kids to explore and boost their creative ideas. They can learn to make little things of personalized stationery like gift cards, ornaments, little showpieces of clay or sticks, or paint a frame, and so on. This not only develops creativity but encourages emotional indulgence through their creation.
You can also plan and play around with many more toy crafts and block-building activities apart from gifting purposes, which they can keep with themselves in their creative space.
5. Outer Space Exploration
This is one area that captures the mind of every kid and widens their imaginations. Talking to kids about space and planning activities around it is one of the excellent methods to develop their creativity while it also provides an added advantage in their school learnings. Small activities like drawing out their space imagination or telling a story about their idea of the moon and stars can boost their creative thinking to great levels.
6. Explore Kid’s Apps, Games, and Gadgets
It is not wrong to think that kids of today’s generation are more involved in digital activities than any indoor and outdoor activities, which is certainly not a good thing. However, it can be controlled by designating a limited time for it. Technology can prove to be a great way for children to exercise their creative muscles. By planning the right digital activities setting a limited screen time schedule for your kids can help them in many ways to be productive and develop their creative thinking skills.
At Little You, we have created one such digital platform for kids, to encourage them to think and foster their creativity, by enabling them to make their own toys characters as per their imagination. The toys they create on our digital platform can also be made real in a 3-D printed form and can turn to be a great surprise element for your kids in return for their creation.