CHCECE018 Nurture Creativity In Children

Childhood professionals

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Table of Contents

Inviting space look like to a child. 3

Many early childhood professionals avoid the use of printed materials. 4

Role of the adult in the play environment 5

Reference List 7

Inviting space look like to a child

Children love to play since a very early stage of life. They start their learning about the environment through play. Therefore, play itself plays a vital role in educating the child. Play can teach the child the details about the environment, basic things like how to act, move, roam around naturally. The play can be an activity for elder people but it is an important part of life for the child at that moment. Through play, they receive direct learning which is also meaningful (Vossoughi et al., 2021). This play has been an integral part of the parents also at the beginning of their parenthood. They use different play tools, materials to interact with their child since at that age, they do not form the communicable language. This interaction through playful activity helps to create a bond between the child and the guardian. To make that bond stronger, the guardian often sets up a play environment for the child. That playful environment is often referred to as an inviting space for the child. It looks like a small world for the child, as it consists of all the favorite toys and materials which child likes to play around with. This inviting space also includes things like pictures of family members to increase connectivity and belongingness in the child. The space consists of all the belonging things that can enhance the connectedness within the child. It is also affordance that creates the conditions required for quality practices (Pairman, 2018). They tend to keep all the learning and teaching-related memories with them throughout their lifespan. It is hard to delete or erase such memories. Therefore, this space should not consist of anything that may instigate a negative feeling in the child. Play is a serious activity for the child as per the work of an employee. Therefore, plays should be practiced in a quiet, healthy, and supervised environment. Most of these spaces are often created as playrooms for children. These spaces are guided and guarded by supervisors, who can be a parent, teachers to the child. This space is like a personally owned, real-world for the children.

Figure: Inviting Space for Child

Source: (Dankiw et al., 2020).

Many early childhood professionals avoid the use of printed materials

Children have the immense desire to explore their creativity through their drawings. These drawings reflect their innocence, ideas, thoughts, and creativity. They hardly have any limitations on their thoughts or ideas. The children are never taught to draw; they generate this process through their playing activities. Therefore, drawing is itself a playful activity for the child. As drawings are a reflection of creativity, similarly, drawings are also the reflectors of a child’s innocent mind. Drawings are done through using many tools and materials, but for children, it is just paper-pencil, blackboard-chalk, or even color-wall connection. Children do not use and should not use any tool to limit their creativity. Though it may provide an opportunity to explore separate places through designs (Mitchell et al., 2018). Such tools like Stencils provide a line or a boundary to limit their idea which would affect their creativity as well as their opportunity of being an individual. The drawings should indeed reflect the exact representation of anything meaningful. However, finding meaning in the drawing of the children is equal to finding the meaning of an unknown language. Drawings for children are not the representatives of anything or material, it is the representation of their feelings, thoughts, and ideas. Even though, they hardly know the fact of feelings, thoughts, and ideas, they merely describe it as their ‘own’ drawing. It showcases the drive to be an individual, express originality, and an urge for belongingness. Drawings should never be limited at the early stage of life. If there is any limitation provided then it would be reflected at every stage of life as a blockage to their ideas. The usage of stencils or paper cutting-like things should be introduced by the professionals at a later stage of life when primary education is also being provided to the children. The flow of the child’s ideas and thoughts should be viewed by the professionals at first without providing any limit or blockage to it. It is known that stencils and paper cuttings should be provided for the perfection of creativity only.

Role of the adult in the play environment

Adults that are connected at the early stage of children are the parents, teachers, guardians, relatives, and many more. The close and first-connector are the parents. The parents introduce the world to the child. It often sees the world through the eyes of the mother. The mother has a huge responsibility to guide, teach and take care of the child. The children feel the safest place to be in the world is their mother’s hug. Therefore, the mother plays a vital role in the life of a child. The father also contributes to parenthood by displaying and performing responsibilities towards the child. The child learns the culture of their parental generation (Riede et al., 2018). When the child is under the supervision of adults other than parents, are care providers that help them to explore the world coming out from the range of parents’ supervision. In the play, too, the child wants to explore its limits through grabbing, falling, grasping, trying out every movement possible. Even the movements function perfectly through the play. Adults need to supervise their children while they explore the play space. They need to take care of the things, situations that are within the reach of the child. The play space provided for the child must consist of a healthy, positive environment. Playful learning enhances the development of children (Yogman et al., 2018). Nothing related to fear, or any negative emotion should be present in that environment. The child’s mind is too vulnerable to go through these feelings. Adults also need to participate equally as per the child’s instructions about the play environment. They should not display any negative emotions like anger in the environment. Instead, they should display positive emotions like happiness, laughter in the environment to make the child experience blissful moments. Therefore, Adults do have an important role to play in the play environment since the environment should be guarded.

Reference List

Dankiw, K. A., Tsiros, M. D., Baldock, K. L., & Kumar, S. (2020). The impacts of unstructured nature play on health in early childhood development: A systematic review. Plos one, 15(2), e0229006. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0229006

Graf, J. (2020). Let Kids Be Kids! The Procedural Dimension of the ‘Best Interests of the Child’ Principle in International Migration Law. Humanitäres Völkerrecht, 3(3-4), 236. DOI: 10.35998/huv-2020-0013

Mitchell, R., Giannousi, A., Nielsen, C. F., Nägele, L., Schibsbye, C., Viberg-Sørensen, L., … & Yufeng, F. (2018, July). Towards fostering play between separate spaces in a public venue. In Proceedings of the 32nd International BCS Human Computer Interaction Conference 32 (pp. 1-5). DOI: 10.14236/ewic/HCI2018.120

Pairman, A. (2018). Living in this space: Case studies of children’s lived experiences in four spatially diverse early childhood centres. Retrieved from: http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/handle/10063/7675

Riede, F., Johannsen, N. N., Högberg, A., Nowell, A., & Lombard, M. (2018). The role of play objects and object play in human cognitive evolution and innovation. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, 27(1), 46-59. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/evan.21555

Vossoughi, S., Davis, N. R., Jackson, A., Echevarria, R., Muñoz, A., & Escudé, M. (2021). Beyond the binary of adult versus child centered learning: pedagogies of joint activity in the context of making. Cognition and Instruction, 39(3), 211-241. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/07370008.2020.1860052

Yogman, M., Garner, A., Hutchinson, J., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Golinkoff, R. M., Baum, R., … & COMMITTEE ON PSYCHOSOCIAL ASPECTS OF CHILD AND FAMILY HEALTH. (2018). The power of play: A pediatric role in enhancing development in young children. Pediatrics, 142(3). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2018-2058