Want to make your school or play setting much more creative and fun, without spending loads of money on fancy materials?
In times of recession creativity is usually the first thing to go – we don’t have the time and the resources, creative projects are a luxury we can’t afford! We need to put our heads down and concentrate on maths and English.
What a shame, when there is so much evidence about the power of creativity and imagination in helping children to learn, connect and develop into confident adults.
Teachers are so pushed for time and I know how tricky finding just the right creative activity is, one that will spark children’s interest and imagination; it can take hours of scouring books and web sites for ideas, so it’s easier to go back to the same old mask making you have done with every class!
I have 20 years experience of working with primary age children in and out of school. I have always had to use whatever materials are available – household items that are usually thrown away, off-cuts of materials gathered from scrap centers, or cheap items such as bamboo blinds.
As well as showing you how to make a variety of fun things, I am also highly experienced running training sessions for adults who work with children. These sessions are practical – where I share as many simple ideas as I can in one session, or about planning creative activities and using ways to encourage children to think and discover for themselves
On this website you will find
Images of past projects
A blog about all aspects of children’s creativity
Information on how to contact me
More details about the training and sessions I offer
Free creative ideas I have gathered from the internet for your convenience
Contact me now for a chat about what aspect of creativity you would like help with
Hi,
we are just finishing our Creative Partnership project and our focus for 2011-2012 is to contunue with teacher creativity and pupil creativity. Our school is committed to teaching knowledge, skills and understanding through creative topics and projects rather than just facts and information.
If you can offer any thoughts, suggestions ideas etc, I would be most willing to discuss further.
Thanks
Adrian Pembleton
Hello Adrian. If you have done the full 3 years of CP then you all will have been on quite an amazing journey already, so the desire is to keep that momentum going? Keeping the teachers feeling enthusiastic and motivated will be a huge key; regular input of creative, practical sessions as well as planning sessions will help them to inspire each other. I think it is important for teachers to have their own creativity nurtured and have a chance to make things and experiment in a supportive atmosphere, as you know, some will be more creatively confident than others. The other thing to think about is how you are coming up with topics and projects; some will be dictated from above, but there is a lot of scope for the children to choose topics they would like to work on. I find doing some creative work with a class can reveal areas of interest that you would not be aware of if you just had a discussion with them and said ‘what are you interested in?’ Sometimes we leave the ‘doing’ until the project has begun, but having a time of making and doing with no prescribed outcome gives the pupils time to think and explore, often giving great insight into things that fascinate them. Have you noticed this yourself?
Hello Jane,
I am an adult who missed out on play as a child, and consequently have had great difficulties during my life. I have been frightened to travel to anywhere unfamiliar, as I had a ‘rubbish’ sense of direction. Almost, I could say i had no sense of direction whatsoever. Small ev eryday tasks were difficult and problematic to me, and I have kept this secret for a very long time. I am a pensioner now, and have been for a very long time!!
However, I am addressing all this and have found and developed strategies for redressing these problems, with which I have had great success, and I feel a more rounded person and I also feel much happier.
I would be really glad of advice – cos i can see that you are someone who could help ME. I am certainly not a child but I can still learn and WANT TO . I have a book here called ‘How to be a Genius’ and the writer stresses the importance of making things. I didn’t do this sort of thing as a kid if i could avoid it as I had astigmatism which was not corrected and couldn’t cut anything in a straight line. My constant plea was ‘Can you help me?’ I think inside I have felt that as a Mantra to my life. I felt useless…..
Perhaps my coming out on your website will encourage all providers of this sort of education to encourage and spend perhaps a little more time working out how they can help kids who may have a degree of my problem. Instead of avoiding this sort of play I patently should have been doing more of it!
Goodness, Wendy, thank you so much for your honesty in sharing that incredible story.
We are so pumped full of ‘they’re ONLY playing’ type messages that we can dismiss the fact that play is an essential part of human development; in fact the more complex humans have become the longer we spend in the playful stage of development (and some would argue that we should be in this stage for LIFE – look up ‘neoteny‘)
Working in 100′s of schools I have seen clearly that the children who experience making on a regular basis are far more confident than those that do not. By ‘making’ I mean any chance to get their hands on even the simplest of materials and make out of them whatever their imagination desires. I have met classes where 9 year olds cannot use scissors and will ask me to cut things out for them; this surely must have a knock on effect to confidence and self trust in other areas of life.
I find that adults who come on my training days get a huge amount out of it and look as though they have had therapy by the end of it. Their faces are lit up and they look different, they have let go and relaxed and had fun and ‘messed about’ and it does them the world of good. I love seeing the change. I have often wondered about doing play days for adults, but have never been sure how to market it. It’s something I am seriously considering and your message makes me think it might be needed after all.
I am not sure what advice I can give you as it seems you are doing a great job of facing the issues you have and doing something about them. There are loads of wonderful children’s books with simple ideas for making things and I still refer to many of them now – much less threatening than adult craft books! Some of them are a bit too prescriptive, but they will still give you ideas for simple arts ideas you could play with. Pretend you are 4 again and get the paint pots out! I love the ‘Anti-Colouring Book’ it has images that are only part done and asks you to fill in the rest, for instance there is a drawing of a boy lying asleep with a big dream bubble over his head and you have to fill in what he is dreaming. And don’t be afraid to destroy things, children often don’t keep what they make because only the ‘doing’ of it mattered and not the outcome.
‘Play’ by Stewart Brown is also a lovely book about the need for adults to play.
Best wishes with your healing journey.
Thank you so much Jane. I will have a look for the Stewart Brown book. I am so enthused by what I have been doing and can see how it is impacting on my life, AND I AM EAGER TO DO MORE. Thank you again. My daughter suggested semi-seriously that I plan the next trip away we have – so I am going to get the maps out and try to make sense of them. THIS IS SLIGHTLY EMBARASSING but what the hell. we all have problem areas and help is around if we stop covering up.