According to psychologist Alan Bowd of Canada’s Lakehead University, children need to foster thinking skills such as these to encourage creativity:
- Fluency -- produce many responses to an open-ended question or problem.
- Flexibility -- generate unconventional ideas and view situations from different perspectives.
- Originality -- produce unique, unusual, or novel responses.
- Elaboration -- add rich detail to ideas.
- Visualization -- imagine and mentally manipulate images and ideas.
- Transformation -- change one thing or idea into another to see new meanings, applications, and implications.
- Synthesis -- combine parts into a coherent whole.
In a mentally playful environment, loose parts are the key for creative play. With them, children learn to construct, take turns, knock down, plan and start all over again.
Bring out those safe, durable and functional loose parts, send a message that they are able to make choices and take risks.
Learning should be FUN!