At first, many of us conceive of “creativity” as an activity pursued sitting down.
But just look at the photo above from our Yellow Room! Creating visual art is a physical activity (even if you do it sitting down…), and you can do it in ways that engage your child’s senses of touch and hearing as well as sight, while building balance and muscle control.
Children can learn much more about themselves, science, and the world around them through creative physical play. For example:
- dancing helps them learn to express their inner feelings non-verbally
- building things from random materials helps them develop ingenuity as well as gross- and fine-motor skills (depending on how big the materials are)
- pretending to be various animals, and play-acting that animal’s activities, leads them to recognize the similarities and differences between our bodies/our lives and those of the animals
You can nurture creativity and activity at the same time in all kinds of ways.
For littler ones: invent silly walks; invent new “patty-cake”-like hand-clapping games; build towers of things to see how tall they can get before toppling over.
For bigger ones: play charades, musical chairs, Simon says; build forts; play “mirror,” in which you face one another and take turns trying to mirror the actions the other person is demonstrating.
In addition to keeping the child active, each of these things helps nurture their development in other ways, be it cognitive, linguistic, problem-solving, or social.
And… they’re fun!