Fostering Your Child’s Creativity

Grow a child’s creativity is a natural process when provided with interesting and challenging opportunities, and free time for unstructured play.

Peggy Gisler and Marge Eberts, educators and co-authors of more than 100 books, suggest the following activities to encourage creativity:

1. Give a child an ordinary household item such as a paper clip or bottle and ask her to imagine other ways that it can be used. A plastic bottle could be a vase, a bowling pin or a terrarium.

2. Draw a straight or curvy line on a piece of paper and have your child turn it into a familiar object. Or give him a page of circles drawn to different sizes. Ask him to create new objects by adding elements to each circle.