13 Ideas For Fostering Creativity In Kids

Creativity is so important for children. It enables them to express themselves freely without judgement and this can nurture your child’s emotional health. Fostering creativity in kids is vitally important to help them to cope with their feelings and to express their thoughts and emotions.

Creating an environment that boosts your child’s creative thinking is not too hard to do and very often all your child needs is some unstructured play time to get those creative juices flowing.

Benefits Of Boosting Your Child’s Creativity

Creative play assists children to develop skills and helps them to grow socially, emotionally and intellectually, as well as physically.

• Emotional development: through creative play children can develop socially and emotionally by integrating feelings with the task at hand. This helps children who are unable to verbalise to express their feelings.
• Social development: when kids are given the opportunity to play and interact with their peers they increase their social development. Singing, dressing up, dancing and other types of imaginative play enable children to develop their social and communication skills.
• Intellectual development: children learn important problem solving skills through creative play and this will enable them to to learn how to solve more complicated problems as they grow older and develop.
• Physical development: whether your child is exploring outdoors or playing indoors creative play creates an opportunity for your child to develop muscle memory, fine motor skills, gross motor skills, coordination, balance, control and hand-eye coordination.

Encouraging children to take part in creative play will help them to develop all of the above skills while exploring and learning about the world they are in.

And important aspect for creative play is to allow your child to take the lead and to use his imagination. Offer some guidance, suggestions and props to get your child going then allow your child to take the lead with free play time.

Fostering Creativity In Kids

Involve Your Child In Problem Solving

If your child has a problem instead of immediately solving the problem as your child what he thinks is the best solution. This will help your child to get creative with his problem solving and get him to try and think things through instead of immediately asking for help.

Likewise if you have something that you need to get done try to involve your child as much as possible. If something needs to be fixed around the house ask your child to help you find a tutorial on Youtube to repair it and ask your child to help you. Yes you may not be successful in repairing it, but it will teach your child that it is a great idea to try and resolve things yourself before calling a professional.

Sensory Play

Sensory play is any type of play that stimulates the senses – sight, sound, smell, taste and touch.  Sensory play is fantastic for young kids. It helps to develop creativity as well as other cognitive skills.

The more children use their senses, the more that they develop them and the ability to use them.

Give your child as many opportunities for sensory play as possible. If it is raining let your child run in the rain, jump in puddles and play with the mud.

Stories Involving Your Child and Family Members

Story telling is a fantastic way to get your child’s imagination running and the creativity flowing. You can make up stories that include your child and other family members in it.

You can also take any story you know and replace one of the characters with your child or other family members to make it fun, exciting and more personal.

There are also many companies that offer story books or animated videos starring your child.

Having your child starring in one of the stories will make it a lot more personal and create an amazing imaginary world for your child to explore.

Photography

Kids just love taking photos with their parent’s phone. Show your child how to take and edit photos then let him loose and see what amazing creations he comes up with.

You will be amazed at how fast they learn how to use devices and all the features of the camera and how to edit photos.

Baking and Cooking

You will be hard pressed to find a child that does not enjoy being in the kitchen making things. Getting your child to bake with you gives you an amazing bonding opportunity as well as a wonderful way to teach your child new skills while boosting his creativity.

You can challenge your child to find recipes online and then make them together. A great way to give the creative juices a big boost is to find alternative ways to make recipes, so tell your child that you don’t want to add chocolate chips into the muffins and ask him what he thinks you can add instead.

You can also make cupcakes and let your child loose to decorate them in his own way.

Superpowers Imaginary Play

Ask your child what superpower he would love to have and tell him what superpower you are going to have. Then play an imaginary game with your child, letting your child take the lead.

You will be amazing at the fun things your child will conjure up to do.

Games – New and Old

Get your child to create a new game and make up the rules. Alternatively you can take an already existing game and ask your child to add in some new rules or change some of the rules to make an entirely new game to play.

Make Fairy Houses

Go outside with your child and collect leaves, sticks, flowers, stones and anything else that is lying around. Encourage your child to make fairy houses with everything you have collected.

You can make more than one fairy house and start a fairy village. Feel free to make up stories to go along with the fairy houses that you are making.

Create Things With Recycling

Why pay loads of money for expensive toys when you have so much at your disposal in your recycling bin?

Grab some things out of your recycling and start making something fun with your child. Look on Pinterest for inspiration or watch some Youtube tutorials with your child.

There is no limit to the amount of things you will be able to make.

Instead of looking up things to make give your child a selection of things and ask him what he wants to make with all of it. This will boost both his creativity and his problem solving skills.

Play With Boxes

If you have bought something that has come in a box it is always a fantastic opportunity for fun and games. Ask your child what he wants the box to be and make it happen.

You can paint a box as a car and have your child sit in it and watch a movie like he is in the drive in. You can make a house for your child’s toys or a garage for his car. There is no end to the fun options when it comes to boxes.

Whenever we get a delivery to our home my kids fight to be the one that gets the box! The bigger the box the better the prize.

Make Forts

Making forts comes with so many amazing creative benefits for your child and will provide hours of fun. Give your child a pile of blankets, pegs, pillows, sheets and anything else you can find in the home that will be good for fort building and watch him create amazing forts.

Dress Up Box

Dressing up can be loads of fun, you can buy superhero outfits or any other type of costumes. You can also add in many fun things for your child to play with, from old clothing to hats, jewellery, scarves and sunglasses.

There are plenty of fun things to buy that don’t cost much at all from fairy wings to a pirates sword.

Finger Painting

Get some paint and paper and let your kid go wild painting with his fingers. This is a fantastic sensory activity for kids that will encourage creativity and imagination.

Puppet Shows

Set up a little stage using a table and give your child some toys and let him hold a puppet show. You can make your own puppets from recycling material, or you can make sock puppets.

This is great fun for kids and they can even hold a show for you.

All of the above ideas are fantastic ways for fostering creativity in kids and getting your child interested in imaginary play, the important thing is to allow your child to take the lead. There are many more ways for your child to engage in creative play. Encourage your child to dance, sing, draw, paint and dress up as much as possible.