Encouraging Creativity in Early Childhood Classrooms. ERIC Digest.

• Encouraging Creativity in Early Childhood Classrooms. ERIC Digest.

  An overview of the ways in which children learn and the factors involved for teachers in fostering creativity in early childhood classrooms. Author: Edwards, Carolyn Pope - Springate, Kay Wright Source: ERIC Clearinghouse on Elementary and Early Childhood Education Urbana IL.

  tags: creativity, encouraging, early, childhood, art, learning

  • Encouraging Creativity in Early Childhood Classrooms.
  • children usually need adult support to find the means and the confidence to bring forth their ideas and offer them
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  • HOW YOUNG CHILDREN LEARN
  • art becomes a natural vehicle in educational approaches for helping children explore and solve problems
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  • an interest in tools and machines and enjoy trying to make things run better, fixing things, and solving functional problems
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  • it is through the unity of thinking and feeling that young children can explore their world, represent their ideas, and communicate with others at their highest level. When educators fully understand how exploration, representation, and communication feed one other, they can best help children achieve this potential.
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  • First, young children are developmentally capable of classroom experiences which call for (and practice) higher level thinking skills, including ANALYSIS (breaking down material into component parts to understand the structure, seeing similarities and differences); SYNTHESIS (putting parts together to form a new whole, rearranging, reorganizing); and EVALUATION (judging the value of material based on definite criteria)
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  • Second, young children want and need to express ideas and messages through many different expressive avenues and symbolic media.
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  • Teachers act as guides, careful not to impose adult ideas and beliefs upon the children.
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  • Third, young children learn through meaningful activities in which different subject areas are integrated
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  • Activities that are meaningful and relevant to the child's life experiences
  • Fourth, young children benefit from in-depth exploration and long-term, open-ended projects which are started either from a chance event, a problem posed by one or more children, or an experience planned and led in a flexible way by teachers
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  • WHAT TEACHERS CAN DO
  • TIME.
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  • SPACE
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  • MATERIALS
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  • CLIMATE
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  • encouragement and acceptance of mistakes, risk-taking, innovation, and uniqueness, along with a certain amount of mess, noise, and freedom.
  • an intense or arousing encounter between themselves and their inner or outer world.
  • OCCASIONS
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  • direct evidence of their senses or memories.

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