Tips to Enhance Creative Thinking In 2-6 Year Olds

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Tips to Enhance Creative Thinking In 2-6 Year Olds


Tips to Enhance Creative Thinking In 2-6 Year Olds

Tips to Enhance Creative Thinking In 2-6 Year Olds

Fostering creativity in 2-6 year olds can be tricky business, as all children this age are slowly in the process of gravitating towards conformity. It is usually around the 3rd grade that children become much more structured and reality-based.

So, increasing the creativity among this group can be daunting task for most parents. This article covers some tips that parents of this age group can employ to have a clear handle on what exactly creativity is and how best to foster it.

The best way to enhance a child’s creativity is through his ability for independent thinking. Teachers and adults need to stop a spoon-feeding model and allow the child to explore his mind and stimulate his thought process within his realm of ability first.

A healthy and positive one on one interaction helps generate a lot of self worth in a child which promotes creative thinking. It’s important to understand the uniqueness of each child and stop comparisons between them and allow them the space and freedom each one needs to grow.

A tremendous amount of generosity shown in terms of a descriptive feedback of a child’s creative efforts can work wonders towards stimulating much more creativity in him. In different areas of curriculum one can explore myriad possibilities for enhancing and encouraging creativity.

  1. Unravelling through Art

Tips to Enhance Creative Thinking In 2-6 Year Olds

Exploring creativity through art is by far the best and one of the most favourite techniques by teachers and parents to foster a child’s creative learning process. Colours can be so stimulating to the mind, and different ways and methods through which these colours change their forms and patterns, be it finger painting, thread painting, creating impressions using blocks and coins, each has its own unique impact on the child’s learning.

The idea is to encourage them to be independent in using art in their own way and allowing them the freedom of thought instead of confining them to rules, followed by appreciation and applaud for each of their art work productions.

2. Music, Dance, Play

Tips to Enhance Creative Thinking In 2-6 Year Olds

It is a proven fact, that children can use their bodies to great extent to express a lot of their emotions and feelings. Children can jump and dance at joy, or stomp their feet in anger. At classroom levels and at home, these magical movements can be used to great lengths to improve a child’s creativity.

Intense active participation in role playing games like making children pretend to be their favourite animal and making them enact like them, or making them use their bodies and facial expressions to be happy, sad, angry, joyful etc. are great ways to stimulate creativity in them.

In older children, the same can be done through group games, and making them generate their own ideas and come up with a dramatization or a voice over of their favourite character. This will also help kill a lot of shyness and reservation of kids who tend to hold back their emotions.

3. Toying with Words

Tips to Enhance Creative Thinking In 2-6 Year Olds

Brain researchers prove that reading and listening to poetry in the formative years helps develop creative potential in children. Story reading sessions can be interactive and a cross question module along with is a great way to have a child don his/her thinking cap and use his brain to its highest level.

Our Role as Adults

Today, the future of your child is not restricted to a high paying job but is actually a deep-rooted sense of emotional well-being because of which he will be able to adapt, create and invent. This in turn will help him achieve an environment suitable to his temperament and a state of security.

Hence, nurturing a healthy and creative atmosphere at each step of his growing up years is important. Stimulating the child’s thinking ability is as important as his creative impression. In fact, the two go hand in hand. Developing divergent thinking is important.

One problem or question can have a series of solution or answers. And that is what these children need to learn. And adults need to maintain an environment conducive for this type of learning.

Experiences should not be restricted to only home. The child’s senses of vision touch smell need to be stimulated. Visits to places like cultural festivals, museums, nature trails etc will help achieve these goals.

The more the child will see the more his mind will come up with questions which will lead to finding his own answers. Along with bouts of encouragement, never forget to point out smoothly where the child is going wrong and that should be done without touching their chord of morale and self worth.

Share your own experiences and how you solved them to boost their confidence and maintain their enthusiasm for learning and being creative.