Do you remember what it was like to be 2, 3, 4, or 5 years old? What you were curious about, what you were afraid of, and what you laughed at? If you want to understand children, it’s essential that you recall what it felt like to be a child. I remember. I remember what I was curious about, what I was afraid of, and what I laughed about.
Don’t make the mistake of interpreting childhood from an adult perspective.
Creativity is not following step by step procedures aimed at reproducing an adult’s ideas.
Creativity is the ability to produce something novel. Four characteristics of creativity are fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration. The focus of early childhood must be on the process, not the product. All children observe the opportunity to try out their ideas differently from anyone else.
THE DESIRE TO PLAY IS SIGN OF A HEALTHY INDIVIDUAL.
My philosophy of play: Play can be serious or purposeless and is self-motivated. Desires for play promote healthy children, Since plays is children’s work, it allows repetition, a sharing of ideas, working together, and problem solving which foster mastery. As well it is promoting discovery and exploring creativity.
Some characteristics of a creative child:
- Great curiosity of how things work (building blocks high and then knocking them down and seeing what happens)
- Sense of playfulness (Telling stories)
- Intense emotions and open to inner feelings (puppet shows)
- Lack of rigidity (putting on a show)
- Positive self-esteem (trying and trying again)
- Daydreamers (role playing)
- Highly intuitive (It is raining because angels are crying.)
- Wanting to experience stuff more challenging (building positive self-esteem and self-worth)
- Independent thinking (want to do things by themselves)
- Long attention span (planning and carrying out an activity)
- Predisposition to create (Continuously building new and different things)
- Tendency to play with ideas (pretending)
- Can tolerate disorder and uncertainty (self-esteem and self-worth growth)
- Can integrate opposing impulses such as destructiveness and constructiveness ( self-esteem and self-worth growth)
****NOT ALL CHILDREN DEVELOP SELF-ESTEEM AND SELF-WORTH IN THE SAME WAY AND AT THE SAME PACE****
Play helps children:
- Cope with stress
- Release negative energy
- Develop problem solving skills
- Become self-motivated
- Learn by doing
- Learn about self
- Be productive
- Growth and freedom
- Creative expression
- Develop mastery through repetition
The scale of a child’s world is bigger and more impressive than it seems to an adult. A child’s world must be full of specific experiences before any generalization is meaningful. A child’s world is full of momentous decisions and discoveries. A child’s world is full of people who know everything that he/she doesn’t. A child’s world is full of feeling.