COP3 Direction Presentation

The Benefits of Encouraging Creativity and Imagination in Young Children.

The presentations on Friday were really helpful for me in seeing what approaches other people have taken towards their COP3 research and their titles.  I also felt that I got some really helpful feedback and am now more confident to progress with my research etc.

Topic:  The Benefits of encouraging Creativity and Imagination in young children.

With a theme of:  How we could improve the way that art and other creative subjects can be taught in schools so that children can experience creativity to their full potential.

Also the true meaning/misconceived meaning of what creativity actually is.

Creativity is not just limited to the arts, but my main focus will be within art.

A few reasons we should encourage creativity:

• Creativity helps with cognitive skills, for example learning maths and science, as it helps develop concentration skills
• Creativity promotes emotional development, creative expression provides many opportunities for expressing emotions and working through those emotions to gain relief and understanding of them
• Creativity also promotes social development and physical development
• Helps develop problem solving skills
• Helps people deal with change
• Helps people keep up with a rapidly changing world
• Helps people communicate their feelings in non-verbal and pre-verbal ways, for example, using gestures, movement and dance.
• Express thoughts by painting and drawing
• Everybody can be creative, not just those who are identified as "gifted"

Book 1:  The first book has been useful for me in learning the true meaning of creativity and how to provide a broad range of creative experiences

Book 2:  Useful for psychology of design for children and information about the beginning of the children's industry for toys, games, books etc

Book 3:  This book I am still reading but I am hoping that it will be helpful in learning more about current issues in art and design teaching.

Book 4:  This book includes examples of lesson plans, worksheets.  Looking at these from a creative perspective they seem quite dull and undesirable to engage with.  I intend to look at these and see how I could improve them.

I'm really interested in getting involved with as many art related community projects or programmes as possible.  I have had a little bit of experience in helping out in classrooms but I wish to get more involved so when I am talking about the theories and things I've learned I am more informed.  This will be good practice for myself anyway as I wish to possible work in a similar area in the future.

I have spoken in person with Gareth Wadkin who is in charge of organising the LCA outreach programmes and he is going to let me know of any taster classes etc which I may take part in.

Saturday Art School at LCA is also another class I would like to volunteer and help out with.  When I am there I would like to speak to the children and try and find out how they feel about creativity and how it benefits them.  (but speak to them in a way that it makes sense to them).

For the Practical Outcome I have suggested:

Using the theories and information which I have gathered about encouraging creativity and take that and design a lesson plan to teach the P1-P3 (Equivalent Year 1 - Year 3) class of Amisfield Primary School (The school my step-mum teaches at in Scotland).  I have had the OK from my step-mum and the head teacher there.  My aim is to get the children to be as creative as possible and then I will document it somehow, possibly in a book, or a calendar.  I also wish to interview the pupils and the teachers about creativity and what they thought about my lesson.  I would like my lesson to be enjoyable for everyone and for everyone to understand that they can all be creative.