Teach your kids to be creative
Roz Streeten, the creator of Rosie Flo offers her top five tips to encourage your child's creativity, through cheap creative games, body language and praise.
1. Sit down and devote your full attention to a joint creative activity. You being there with them gives them greater pleasure than any they will get from looking at their own finished creative outcome and in time they get to associate it as a pleasurable experience and are happy to do it alone.
2. Don’t necessarily do their piece with them, have a go yourself at whatever they are doing alongside them so that you both end up with a finished version of for example a painted egg. They love seeing what their parents come up with. If you think you want to do it with them, or they want you to, then papier mache is good to do together as it takes so long single handedly.
3. Genuinely offer praise to them for their creative outcomes and gratefully accept their compliments back about your own creation. Don’t say your own picture is rubbish (even if you think it is- it’s a learnt reaction that your child will copy and start to believe). Don’t tell them that their colouring/drawing or whatever is good because it’s neat (neatness is not necessarily good).
4. They respond well to extending their own existing worlds of play. Shoe boxes and dishwasher tab boxes (because they are strong) are great to use to make little houses or castles for their existing toys like Sylvaneans or Play people. Beds are always a good one to make, even for Barbies. A Tamagotchi bed, house or even village is good as they don’t exist in the shops so it stops them thinking it’s not as good as the beds you buy. Painting stones as characters is another alternative.
5. The mess factor seems to be the biggest dread for parents when their children want to be creative. Change your way of thinking about it being any kind of time off for you. Modeling clay like Daz can be really controlled if you don’t give them too much at once. Good things to make are little flat ginger bread characters or dinosaurs using cookie cutters (or just shapes you can draw a face on) and beads which you can dry and paint. Tiny little 3d modelled animals like cats or dogs lying down curled up are good and a little bed for them to go in, or a bird in a nest with eggs, is fun for them to paint when they’ve dried out.