Monday, July 11, 2011

An Atmosphere for Creativity

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.

 

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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.

 

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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!

 

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Friday, July 1, 2011

Magical Fairy Land

 

The girls really wanted to put up a fairy garden and I thought the idea was simply enchanting. Our fairy garden took two weeks to assemble. As in any project it required planning, a great deal of imagination and knowledge about the subject. We incorporated some elements of design: PROPORTION, COLOR, SCALE, and PATTERN to accomplish this fairy garden.

 

 

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Here are a few things that the children came up with while planning Fairy Land.

1. A fairy garden should look just like our gardens outside. It should include lots of vines, flowers, rocks, grass, trees, moss, colorful pebbles, and a fairy cottage. Most importantly, it should be very colorful. “Fairies love pink, purple, yellow and light green”.

2. It should include a water feature.

3. Fairies need a variety of trees, both big and small. They need them to hide  and play.

4. Fairies love all animals…horses are their best friends.

5. Fairies love to use mushrooms as furniture and shade from the sun and rain. Giant mushrooms are the best!

6. Since they have tiny ears, they don’t enjoy loud sounds.

 

 

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A fairy tunnel.

 

 

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Mermaid friends who live in a “ocean river”.

 

 

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Trees and plants.

 

 

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A giant mushroom or a fairy house.

 

 

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A bridge connected to two big trees.

 

 

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