School Journal | Log 5 | Creativity & Imagination (Before School)

In log 1 I had listed out 7 key skills that children seem to pick up during their first 5–6 years. In log 2, log 3 and log 4 I covered how they seem to develop motor skills, language skills and cognitive skills. Now I shall attempt to understand the much more complex and vague area of creativity and imagination as it is developed in children during the first 5–6 years of their life.

I wasn’t sure whether to start off with a question about what creativity is, how its is developed or why it’s important. So, I threw a more generic query at google to see what I get for “development of creativity and imagination in children before school”. The AI generated answer told me about ways in which creativity and imagination can be developed and supported.

At this stage, I think it might be useful for me to attempt to paraphrase and structure this answer. It seems that the ingredients for encouraging and developing creativity and imagination are:

• Access — Provide children with stories, ideas, visual, auditory and thought based stimuli. The idea here is to spark curiosity, create some initiative and get them thinking or imagining in any way possible.
• Environment — Create a space which is conducive for creativity. This might mean providing sufficient physical space and time, removing constraints and distractions or ensuring that they feel safe and excited about creating ideas and imagining.
• Resources — Provide children with equipment which can be used to create ideas, works of art, models of any sort, stories or play make believe. Open ended and flexible equipment are likely to be more useful to stimulate creativity. Even with more targeted equipment, it is useful to encourage open ended play, rather than something prescriptive.
• Positive Feedback — With creativity and imagination there is no direction which is needed, but only encouragement to promote its development. Children should feel that their creativity is useful and appreciated and thus be encouraged to imagine and create more.

Most of the articles that I’m able to find, both for this search query and other variants of it seems to talk mainly about the inputs required to develop creativity and imagination. The good news is that they all seem to align with this broad framework. The bad news is that I haven’t been able to find too much information about what sort of specific milestones to look out for and work towards as a part of development. But that is hardly surprising, since a skill such as creativity is inherently open ended, and not one that you can plan for too very much.

However, on a similar note, I did find 2 articles which I thought were fairly useful.

This euro kids India blog article talks about some of the benefits of creativity and imagination (in line with most other articles):

• Enhanced cognitive development
• Emotional growth
• Social skills
• Academic success (curiosity and motivation)
• Future readiness

Most interesting for me was this raising children .net.au article on some outcomes to expect as “school-age” children develop their imagination:

• A clearer understanding of what’s real vs pretend
• Ability to plan and execute creative activities (drawing, dancing, music etc)
• Ability to make up and tell a story
• Overcoming select fears like monsters the dark and possibly pet animals

Once again, as with the other skills picked up before school, I don’t believe that there is much value in me trying to recreate this learning process. Having documented this, I intend to understand the breakdown of the next few skills which children pick up before attending school.