Four Ideas to Boost Creativity and Play
A great deal of time and energy is put towards assessment in the context of education. Determining a student’s comprehension of concepts across all curricular subjects, and documenting their performance and progress over the course of the school year, is a critical aspect of teaching and learning. However, it is necessary for teachers to provide a balanced approach to assessment to truly meet the strengths and needs of their students. Assessment needs to be viewed as more than documenting and testing, but also as a means to get to know our students, how they best learn, and how we can help them grow.
With that said, students need opportunities to be creative, curious, and self-expressive, where there are no expectations to get something “right” or complete a task. This kind of learning values process over product. Allowing students time in the day to play, explore, build, and create can alleviate the stress of assessment (for students and teachers). It can also be a break from traditional learning to something that is student-led and experiential.
The following activities are appropriate for students from Kindergarten to Grade 6.
Doodling
Make sure that every student has paper and a selection of crayons, pencil crayons, or markers to draw with. Invite students to doodle while you read a book or play a video. Doodling improves attention, memory, and creativity while also reducing stress, which helps them to learn. Therefore, doodling can be welcome in the classroom on a regular basis. There are no rules to doodling as it is simply the act of drawing words, images, or shapes on paper.
Sensory Play
Create sensory stations with items such as playdough, sand, water, ice, beans, cooked spaghetti or bowls of cornstarch and water. The purpose is for students to play with their hands. Depending on the sensory item they can roll, squish, pull, flatten, or swish. Play gentle meditative music as students explore at each station. Have students explore in small groups and only spend two or three minutes at each station.
Found Objects
Collect a large number of “found” objects such as toilet paper rolls, plastic containers, boxes, poster board, sticks, egg cartons, tissue paper, cloth, yarn, and rope. Students can also bring items from home. Provide tape. Individually or in small groups, students can use the found objects to build. Let them know they do not need to build anything specific for any particular purpose. They can start with one object and add on other items. At any point they can take apart what they’ve made and build something new. Suggest that they see how many ways they can build different structures using the same materials.
Movement Exploration
Provide students with cones, hoops, benches, mats, ropes, bean bags, scarves, and any other equipment available to them. Invite them to work together to place the items around the gymnasium, or a large room, in any formation they desire. It does not have to make “sense” or create a path. When all of the equipment has been placed, put on music of your choice and invite the students to explore. They can walk, jump, or tumble over, on, around, or through the equipment. Let them know there is no starting or end point. The only “rules” are to watch where they are going and be mindful of each other’s personal space.
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Traci L. Scheepstra, Ph.D., is the CEO/Founder of Embodied Learnings.Read here to learn more about her work in education.