Daily Creativity – Simple Things That Nurture Creativity

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daily creativityWelcome to my new series: Daily Creativity… this is a simple series that aims to nurture creativity and nothing else.

There is no real goal other than exploration, having a go, practising techniques, stimulating and in a small way each day, developing creativity.

It is called “daily”, not because I will post “daily”, but because many of the ideas will be things you can do quickly and easily and on a “daily basis” (if you were so inclined).

Also.. the idea is, not do these things just *once* and tick them off the list, but to do them again and again and again.

 

It ties in with Kids Get Arty, but is different. Kids Get Arty, has an “outcome”, a piece of art. Daily Creativity doesn’t, but it supports Kids Get Arty, as Daily Creativity let’s your child develop techniques, develop their imagination and memory, learn about colours, about paint and about how things work!

To kick start us off, we did some simple potato printing:

Materials: potatoes, paint, recycled paper

I cut and E and an H out for him. I thought it would make for great pattern exploration, as well as reinforce his alphabet!

We used large sheets of old packing paper that Smudgetikka gave me when she moved house. I think newspaper would be great too. Make it all as “simple” as possible. Encourage waste (for that reason do use recycled materials if you can!!).

nurturing creativity

Interestingly, there was a lot of ANXIETY for Red Ted – he wanted to get things right and perfect and was in some ways overwhelmed by this openendness. So I was even more pleased that we did this. We had a repeat session in the afternoon (with the “city scape” potato prints) and he was much more confident and enjoyed it a lot more.

There can be many learning outcomes to this session – e.g.

* Learning about how to print – sometimes children (and adults) “load” the stamp with too much paint… which gives you a messy resulting printing. Sometimes the 2nd or 3rd print is nicer. But of course it is personal preference.

* Learning about colour – we did mix colours later on, to see what would happen when you mix yellow with red (this distressed Red Ted the first time, he likes mixing colours, but with a brush, not his potato

* Looking at patterns.. what happens when you align your prints, put them next to each up side down etc

We did talked about all of the above, but I let Red Ted do what *he wanted to do*, whilst doing some prints next to him.

potato printing

We will most definitely be doing more potato printing in the near future!