Ten Activities That Can Increase Your Kid's Creativity -- Guest Post

Rev Up Your Kid's Creativity with Unique Activities!

When it's time to focus your kids' attention away from video games and texting, parents often struggle with how to interest kids in creative activities. To rev up your kid's creativity, begin by considering your kid's age level, general interests and attention span.

It's important to choose activities that meet with your kid's attention span. For example, the attention span of today’s five year old kids has a duration of about then minutes.

For older children, ages ten to fifteen, they may be able to concentrate for up to one hour without losing interest in the activities you provide. Keep in mind that each kid has a diverse sense of whimsy and fantasy that is all a part of their creative thinking.

1. Making Music is Fun and Creative

For the first activity, parents may want to invest in ear plugs and several musical instruments like tambourines, maracas, castanets, ukuleles and small tambor drums. There is a wealth of creativity to be found for kids who have the chance to "make music." These basic musical instruments help children develop a sense of sound, rhythm and ability to create music that requires "teamwork."

2. After a wild session with musical instruments, parents may want to reverse the frenetic pace by allowing kids to dance to classical music in free form. If parents prefer, they can also teach their kids classic ballroom dance steps. The idea is to allow kids to "feel the music" and to create adaptive movement that is uniquely theirs.

3. There's another creative and fun activity kids will love: creating rhyming words. Parents can give their kid a small picture of a cat or dog, and make a game of finding as many words that rhyme with these words. Older children can write them down. To make it more of a contest, offer a prize to the kid who rhymed the most words.

4. Nothing is more creative or fun than a scavenger hunt. Kids' creative juices spike when parents create a list with five items kids should hunt for. The hunt can be done at home, in a library, museum, outdoors in a park with supervision or in their own room or even their toy box. It's a great way to get children to creatively organize their possessions so they can be found at a future date.

5. Creating a Recipe

Few kids understand how to follow recipes. By allowing kids to create a recipe of their very own, they can see the connections between certain ingredients, preparation, cooking or baking time and serving food to others. For this, parents can use a list of basic ingredients like cookie crumbs blended with cream cheese to make truffles. Provide cocoa or powdered sugar and cookie decorations they can roll the truffles in.

6. Organizing Kids Money

Kids today don't often get a chance to use cold hard cash. It may be a creative learning curve to teach them how to count back change from a dollar or make a game of having them purchase items from your pantry with a specified amount of "play" money.

7. Activities for Autonomy

As kids become more independent, parents need to reinforce the idea of responsibility. Provide activities kids can do without assistance that fits into a general plan.

For example, allow kids input for the next family outing, such as organizing an itinerary for sightseeing and preparing the things for family outings. Older kids can research sights they feel all members of their family want to see. By allowing kids to create a sightseeing itinerary, they develop a sense of timing and also a keen sense of awareness of their family's likes and dislikes.

8. Hands On Creative Activities

Make a game of teaching very young children how to tie their laces. Older children should be exposed to learning how to sew buttons or put labels on their clothing. These are valuable skills they can develop for use in a variety of arts and crafts.

9. Speaking of Arts and Crafts

While kids' fingers grow ever more adept at texting, their fingers need a more creative outlet like crafting their own scrapbooks or learning the creative art of sculpting. Sculpting for kids can begin with ordinary clay or kids’ putty. Provide an idea of a form from a picture or other source and then let their creative juices flow.

10. Who Am I?

There is an artist in every kid. Too often, their art is limited to living room walls. Create a structured format for their "artwork" by allowing them to create free form drawings of themselves on large poster board paper. The result of their self-imagery might be fascinating.

Conclusion

Every kid has a creative urge that needs to be set free. When kids are working hands on instead of allowing hi tech devices to do it all for them, they realize their true inner sense of creativity.

It's Art; Let Them Do It

On Saturdays, we do a family specials program that the kids love. We do gym, art, and music in quick succession. It's metered out to a toddler's attention span. For an adult, well, it's quick enough to make your head spin.

Anyway, during the art portion, they set up small, fun projects for the kids to do. One strange thing I noticed? The parents are doing the projects. Why? The teachers are encouraging this, too. I don't get it.

They had the parents "help" the kids paint a yellow sun the other day. They had the parents put the sun's eyes in place. They had the parents glue a yarn smile on the sun.

I had my kids do it. Our suns looked just like everyone else's...almost.

 

Are their smiles as bright and even as the others? No, not quite. Are their eyes in the right spot and perfectly separated? Nope. Is their yellow smoothly painted with no mess? Absolutely not. But they did it. All by themselves.

And the noses? Everyone in that class had a sun with the nose because my girls looked at the completed craft and said, "Hey, where's the nose?"

"Great point," said the teacher. She brought out those puffs and noses were had by all.

Would any of the other kids come up with that since their parents were doing their projects for them? Maybe. But they didn't.

This is not to say I think doing your kids' projects is wrong or bad, but, personally, I want these little things as keepsakes. I want the girls to look back on them in 10 years when they go through storage boxes and see exactly what they did -- by themselves -- at three.

They hung them up in their room by themselves, too. Well, almost. I did the tacking part, but they picked out the spots and held their suns for me.

Beautiful!

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Adding Some Pizzaz to that Headband

As you can tell from the title, I didn't write this one. I'm about as crafty as a foot. The crafter-extraordinaire at The Crafting Hobbit took pity on me and made matching headbands for my girls. And, let me tell you, they love them. We are going on day three of endless-headband wear. Here's they're affectionately called Bandheads for some reason, but I'm digressing. They insisted we put them on as soon as the package came in.

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I love this project because it’s really simple and even something you can do with your children. Start with a fabric headband, if you don’t have one you can use my headband tutorial to make one. And if you can’t sew don’t fret you can use fabric glue instead. Fabric glue is great to have especially if you aren’t a sewer. You can use it to fix hems and tears without a needle and thread.

You’re going to need some for this project. I splurged and got myself a Crop A Dile because it also has a built in hole puncher. You can get all sorts of nifty grommets, they come in different colors and even different shapes (like stars and flowers).

Choose a pattern and the grommet colors you’d like to choose and take some tailors chalk (if you don’t have that you can use a plain pencil) and mark out your pattern.   Ask the kids what they want on their headbands or even let them mark out a pattern. 

Now you’re ready to put in your grommets.  I prefer to punch a hole where my grommet it going to go so I get a cleaner edge. Follow the recommendations on your particular pliers to get the best results.  

Once I punch a hole I put my grommet through the hole and then use my Crop A Dile. The kids can help with this part too, they’ll love squeezing the pliers together to get the grommets to stay in place.

Once you’ve completed your pattern you’re done.  This project is great for a rainy afternoon and because you can skip the sewing all together and use fabric glue everyone can make themselves a pizzazzed headband.  If you don’t like grommets you can use snaps or even buttons and glue them on your headband.

Come check out The Crafting Hobbit to check out my other crafts.

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So, fabric glue! That's what I need. Because, Lord knows, I can't sew! And grommets. I didn't even know that grommet was a word for something.  Thanks, Irene, for these lovely headbands! They're excellent for keeping pesky curls out of the kids' eyes!

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The Crafting Hobbit says about herself: "I'm mommy to an amazing little guy and wife to a loving (although sometimes frustrating) husband. Both of which have Asperger's. I became an Earth friendly, crunchy, granola mommy. I'm really loving my return to the simpler things in life. I knit and I've recently started sewing. I dabble in other crafts and love creating things. I tested positive for the BRCA 2 mutation and I will be undergoing a prophylactic bilateral mastectomy."

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Artistry

When other people's two year olds draw pictures for their parents, it's scribbling.  Today, I learned for the first time that when mine do it, it's art.

See what I mean?  This is too beautiful for the fridge door.  No magnet should tarnish the composition and subtlety of this masterpiece.  It needs to be framed, nay, it needs to be in a museum.

All joking aside, this piece of paper represents a turning point in Natalina's life.  Her favorite color, obviously, is purple.  She wears purple clothing, paints with purple paint, and as you can see, will only color with the purple crayon.  The difference today is that she has now spent 90 minutes - yes, that's right, an entire hour and a half - sitting contentedly on the floor, shading and reshading this piece.  (This picture was taken at 20 minutes in.)

Previously, both twins would pick a blank sheet, scribble on it for 30 seconds, and flip to the next page.  Natalina is no longer scribbling, at least not in process.  She's putting thought into her strokes and completing a work before moving on.  It's magical to watch.

Dulce is jealous.  She is trying to distract Natalina, to draw her into some form of play that involves both babies.  When that doesn't work, she will try to block Natalina's work, either by stealing her crayon or sitting on her paper.  It's cute, but a little sad.  The artist bug has yet to bite her, I guess.

The contrast between the two really shows the development that is taking place.  A scribble versus a thought-out scribble.  The lazy scrawls versus the disciplined shading attempts.  Not a big difference to the untrained eye, but a huge difference to me.

And lest anyone think Dulce is lacking in creativity, rest assured, she makes up for her disinterest in art in other ways.  Like making hats out of coffee filters.

Two year olds are often tough to handle, but on mornings like these, I just love this age.


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