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TryingMyBest
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| Posted: Dec 04 2013 at 11:17am | IP Logged
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I'm not very creative which I regret so I want DD to creative (I know that is a open-ended wish). She rarely chooses to draw or paint and I wonder if that's because I don't emphasize it enough or perhaps I've discouraged it by not making supplies accessible or worrying about messes.
So I've purchased The Artful Parent and have been pouring online pictures of art areas and ateliers.
Have any of you been able to change the environment of your home to make it more conductive to creativity? Were the children more likely to start drawing or modeling or whatever if the materials were accessible? Do you think it's better to organize the projects or let kids lead the way?
I'd like DD to be more creative but the solution to that can't be me telling her "be more creative and color this paper using the red crayon," KWIM?
Jenn
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JennGM
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| Posted: Dec 04 2013 at 5:05pm | IP Logged
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Jenn,
I've been pondering your question. I don't think there's a cut and dried answer, but really multiple possibilities.
First of all, what do you mean by creative? Do mean exclusively using art materials? I find creativity can extend into all areas. One area my boys have a creative outlet is through building, mainly Legos, but also through blocks, planks, Lincoln logs, Tinkertoys, K-nex, etc. Lately they have been creating low budget stop motion, and I love seeing their inventiveness and creativity.
I would call myself creative, but probably not too artsy. Needlecrafts, sewing, calligraphy, pysanky, playing piano and organ, singing. These are all creative outlets. Part of the inspiration with my boys is seeing Daddy or Mommy create. When I do things, they want to learn and join me.
And simple inspiration comes from reading, seeing beautiful art, discussing, doing small things like coloring together. We talk openly about beauty around us -- I've pointed out to them at the beautiful different hued eggs from the farmer, making a pretty picture even at the bottom of my sink. On walks we pick up leaves or a bud or point out clouds or shapes of trees and favorite colors.
And sometimes it's just looking at picture books and talking about how the illustrations were made. Sometimes I lead and talk about how could I recreate a picture like this, but now it's natural that they try to write their own comic strips, or do some art media.
Creativity can also be expressed in cooking and baking, although lately we haven't had much of that. And for your daughter, perhaps in fashion or decorating -- making doll clothes, paperdolls, curtains, decorating a doll house.
And what about creativity with writing and illustrating stories? I just bought some more composition notebooks that have the half blank page for illustrations. That really inspires my boys.
Artistic Pursuits is a great program to go through different art media and styles, but also there are books that can do that. Usbourne Books have a few, and Mary Ann Kohl's books have some great inspiration. It's not about the end project but the process is the main point.
We go to the library once a week at least, and lately the boys have been coming home with books on how to draw, and ideas of building cars and boats. Paper airplanes was another recent interest.
We don't have an overwhelming amount of art supplies, but I do try to provide a variety to experiment and most of it is accessible. The messier ones I keep separate for other times.
So that's just a brainstorming of creativity in our house. When I first read your post my first thought was "we're not creative" but after typing this up I'm seeing we are a lot more than I realized!
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JennGM
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| Posted: Dec 04 2013 at 6:17pm | IP Logged
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Oh, and I forgot a very obvious one--making music. Music is a key component in our home.
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JodieLyn
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| Posted: Dec 04 2013 at 7:07pm | IP Logged
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And of course, perhaps if you tried to explore your creative side, she would follow suit.
We help our little guys (2 and 3) be creative with building blocks.. the big important lesson here is.. if it falls down or if we knock it down, we can build another. So we can delight in the disassembly just as we can in the assembly. And you learn to be brave enough to try something new, when you learn that it falling apart is ok and you just try again.
As far as art materials.. sometimes what you need is some "how to" instruction before you feel safe to be creative. Like, when you learn different ways to use a paint brush, then you can make the choices that are a creative use. So sometimes it needs to be guided exploration and lots of mistakes are ok(in all parts of life) to allow children to choose to be creative.
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SallyT
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| Posted: Dec 04 2013 at 10:45pm | IP Logged
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Yes, what Jenn and Jodie said! "Creative" can take so many forms . . . and it can be the way someone arranges a room, or dresses. Or cooks. Or sews. Or solves problems. You might not know in what way your daughter is creative (and she might not know) until she ages into a stage where suddenly she is able to do things like read a recipe and use the oven, or run a sewing machine without help, or starts doing higher math, or writing code for video games, or thinking of solutions to seemingly insoluble difficulties.
Some of encouraging creativity is supplying imaginative things to play with -- the kinds of open-ended toys that don't tell the child how to play with them. As a child, I also made toys out of virtually everything, and made characters for stories I told myself out of . . . well, my brother had a pair of orange plastic toy pliers, and I used them as either a toucan (the long handles were the beak) or a parrot (the short pincer part was the beak). Dollhouses were huge for me -- again, I was into narrative (I'm now a poet, essayist, and fiction writer, which makes most of my childhood quirks make sense), and even before I could really write, I could *play* endless stories with my doll family. Dress-up clothes are good. A place to play house is good . . . anything that encourages open-ended imaginative play is feeding a child's creativity, though how that will manifest ultimately is always anyone's guess.
I think the main thing, though, is just to back off and let a child play. I don't know what it would have done to me if an adult in my life had said, "Use the toy pliers as PLIERS, because that's what they ARE," or worried excessively about me because I didn't use them as pliers but as birds, in bird stories I told myself. My mother thought I was the weirdest kid alive, but she left me mostly alone to do my weird little things, and that was a huge blessing. As a mother myself, I would also -- within judicious limits -- not interfere with a child's clothing choices (both my girls went through phases of extremely eccentric outfits -- the one who's almost 20 is now a fabulous dresser, and I have hope for the 10-year-old) or desired room arrangement. I mean, within limits, obviously. But if a child has a really strong sense of how she wants something to look, an inner image that she's trying to produce in reality, I'd try to work with that and honor it, if at all possible.
The hardest thing about the obviously arty or cooking or sewing kinds of creativity is that they get messy, and that's difficult when you have limited space that you don't want trashed all the time. I have a really cruddy kitchen table on purpose -- it's a 1980s tile-topped particleboard table, which can be used as a whiteboard and has had everything spilled on it, smeared on it, dripped on it . . . It's just our kitchen table now, because we have a big kitchen, but in years past and in smaller spaces, it's been *the* table we had. I just let the kids make messes on it during the day, then wiped off the worst and threw on a tablecloth at night. Kid cooking gets really messy, too, but I try to look the other way and not be too obviously uptight about the quality of the cleanup job.
I really think that that's 99% of encouraging creativity -- not DIScouraging it because it creates mess, disruption, and chaos in your home. And although I was the poster child for right-brained/creative/messy/disorganized/strange, I find I can be really, really Type A about things in my own house (maybe because I know how fragile the order really is! Or because I have things creatively arranged to correspond with the pictures in my mind -- this house is MY art project, children!). So sometimes I have to breathe deeply, look the other way, and busy myself with my own project while other people do theirs.
Anyway . . . all this from the perspective of someone who grew up to be a writer. My mother says that when I was little, she used to be continually frustrated with me because I would not sit nicely with her and put a puzzle together -- I would take one piece and go into a corner and start talking to it. (I still remember some of those puzzle pieces, too, the way I remember the pliers). Fortunately, if she tried to stop me, I don't remember it, and she soon gave up and left me alone. I should remember to thank God more often for that. And again, of all the things you can do to encourage creativity, I think that's probably the most important.
Sally
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JennGM
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| Posted: Dec 05 2013 at 9:45am | IP Logged
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Loved your post, Sally! I was thinking further about creativity and you filled in the gaps what I missed. Writing, telling of stories, open-ended play -- so key. I hear the imagination of the boys in their play, making up stories.
My family has 7 children, 5 girls and 2 boys, and the first 4 were girls, so we were definitely more feminine in style of play. We often played paperdolls, barbies, Little People, even cars, building elaborate housing with Legos or blocks. We would come up with unique names and story lines and always use different voices for each character. I thought nothing of it until I was visiting another home and the children didn't make the figures do the talking, nor did they do make voices for each figure.
My boys do voices but definitely more sound effects in their play.  That's a key difference with boys vs. girls that I see.
Playing or acting out what they see or read or hear, that is another area. Ater reading some of the Greek stories, my sons put on a reenactment of Jason and the Golden Fleece in our living room using Playmobil. And I still chuckle at the thought of seeing my younger son looking like the Norse god Odin (after older brother talked about D'Aulaire's books). This god can only use one eye, so covers his bad eye with straw. My son had a gold "Terrible Towel" draped over his eye, looking so serious playing his role.
But all this creative, open-ended play is a bit messy. As a mother it drives me crazy sometimes that Legos, Playmobil, Little People and blocks are all out at the same time, but it's all combined play.
I find when I am a creative process, even writing, I have stuff strewn everywhere -- all my books for reference, etc. The creative process is a bit untidy  and I have to learn to tolerate the mess (also teach them good habits to clean afterwards).
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Betsy
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| Posted: Dec 05 2013 at 10:06am | IP Logged
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I love everything that has been posted here! 
Some little thought I have to add are:
:: Making sure your child feels comfortable enough to experiment. As a huge left brained person *failure* was a difficult concept for me to get over to unleash my creativity. This was so hard for me that I don't think I could fully embrace it until after I became a Mother and *failure* was.is something I have had to deal with on a regular basis.
::Study the masters! Two years ago at a CM conference I attended, Jenifer Spencer gave her doctoral thesis on CM's method of teach language acquisition. One of the students she followed read profusely from great authors and his mother commented that when he became emerged in an Author that that author's style was reflected in the student work and writing at that time. After doing this for years, he later developed his own style taken from the masters!
The same thing can be done by *studying* the masters. Picture study is a easy and priceless way for painting. Listening to different genres of music and composer is perfect for music. Exposer to many different forms of creativity from people that are "masters" is awesome. You never know what will spark someone to creativity!
::A corollary to this is take class to expose your child to different mediums and instructors. I love to watch artist do there work! Often I know that I am not able to do way they do, but I celebrate that God gave them this gift and I am able to participate in it---another form of creativity!
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TryingMyBest
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| Posted: Dec 05 2013 at 11:15am | IP Logged
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Thanks everyone for the great advice!
SallyT, I loved what you wrote about your house being your art project. I'd never thought of it that way but I do see our condo as a place to express myself while building a comfortable home for our family. Which is part of the problem because I'd rather not have all of the clutter that creativity involves in my house.
Part of this is about me, really. I received a good education even though the arts were neglected. I was a dancer growing up and my parents exposed us to classical music but I never learned much about art (meaning painting, etc) which I've always regretted and would like to rectify with my daughter.
I think that this, like most of motherhood, is not about materials, etc but instead about my needing discipline to make art a priority here. Which means that I may need to get over my "don't make a mess!" reaction and that I need to do some planning.
Jenn
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JodieLyn
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| Posted: Dec 05 2013 at 11:44am | IP Logged
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One thing I tend to do.. I pull out the paints and such in the summer when I can set them up outside with ready access to a HOSE for clean up
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Jodie, wife to Dave
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Betsy
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| Posted: Dec 05 2013 at 11:49am | IP Logged
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I am going to follow up my post by saying that some structure is often needed for creativity to happen.
For instance, anyone who has ever sat down to a blank canvas, weather to write, paint, crate, ext. knows how extremely hard it can be to begin from that point.
So, DON'T start there!
Take a class by your self and share with your daughter, or have your daughter take a class. This will give you a place to spring board from to make the project your own.
I.e., Do something structured first to learn some skills or a craft and then allow time and materials to build on that! Another way of looking at it is that creativity is some that acts in isolation. To be *creative* we often need to do some hard work to get there.
For instance, I have taught three of my dc how to knit. We went slow with learning, and then once they gained competency in the basic skills I made them finish a project start to finish. There were times when this was a big fight for them to work through. I did stick to my guns though so that they followed through and finished something (not related to creativity, but definitely a huge obstacle in crafting--finishing project when the *fun* is gone!). Now that they have this basic skill set they have been able to create more freely with knitting. Often I see my ds kit a little bracelet or "thing" that is needed at the moment. He couldn't have done this without some basic knowledge.
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JennGM
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| Posted: Dec 05 2013 at 12:31pm | IP Logged
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Just reading a quick biography on Barbara Cooney, and I thought some of the descriptions and quotes from her on how she became an artist really fit in this thread:
Barbara Cooney
Quote:
GROWING UP LOVING ART: Cooney came from a family of artists. Her great-grandfather had been an artist. He had encouraged his children and grandchildren to paint and draw. When Cooney started to draw, she was surrounded with all she needed to begin.
"That I too am an artist is largely due to the tubes of paint, brushes, paper, and other art supplies that were always available to my mother's children," she recalled. Her mother had one rule: she had to keep her brushes clean.
Cooney loved it when an illness would keep her home in bed. "My favorite days were when I had a cold and could stay home from school and draw all day long," she recalled.
BARBARA COONEY WENT TO SCHOOL at a local boarding school. She remembered that although she was thought of as a good artist, "I was truly terrible."
Cooney never thought of herself as a talented artist. "I started out ruining the wallpaper with crayons, like everybody else," she said. "Most children start this way, and most children have the souls of artists. Some of these children stubbornly keep on being children even when they have grown up. Some of these stubborn children get to be artists. I became an artist because I had access to materials, a minimum of instruction, and a stubborn nature."
Cooney went to Smith College, an all-women's school in Massachusetts. She studied many different subjects and also took art classes. She remembers that she loved color. "Most of what I did was in full color. The more color the better."
After college, Cooney tried to find a job as a book illustrator. But at that time, publishers wanted black-and-white drawings. So Cooney took classes to improve her skills. |
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Jennifer G. Miller
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TryingMyBest
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| Posted: Dec 06 2013 at 7:21pm | IP Logged
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The little art areas in DD's bedroom and our living are starting to come together and in the last few days, DD has started using the art supplies, even without my suggesting it. I think there is definitely something to the idea that if you create an environment where art supplies are easily accessible to children that they will reach for those supplies and start to experiment and play.
We've colored, drawn, painted and played with playdough in the last week which is probably more art than we've done in weeks. Success!
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4Real Forums : The Arts in the Everyday
Topic: Encouraging Creativity?
