Giving Creativity a Chance

This month we talk about all the creepy crawlies out there. Do you know what sends shivers down my spine? Walking past a classroom and hearing a teacher stamp out their student creativity. I still remember my mentor teacher instructing me that I need to be more explicit in my directions of how to make a turkey; because some of my students didn't color theirs brown-I had purples and reds. For me, there was nothing wrong with that; this teacher couldn't believe I would hang up such monstrosities. The kids get so used to a teacher telling them how to do it, what colors to use-they lose that sense of creating the image they have in their minds.

Unless we're doing a science activity, where we are recording the details of something real; my kids have free reign over their work. When they ask me what color to use to make the bat, my answer is always "you are the artist, you decide." It might be kind of selfish on my part because I really just love to see the different things they can come up with. After studying bats for a week, they wrote some bat poems and made a very simple paper plate bat cave and construction paper bat. Look at all the different ways they came up with to do it though! How boring the world would be if everyone did everything the same way. I encourage my kids to create something original, something unlike any other project in the room. I get funny looks from other teachers, but at least I let my students' artistic voices come through and if it can come through on a project-imagine in their writing, or when they come up with a new way to do math. These are our future designers, architects, teachers-they should have some originality up their sleeves.