How can we be creative? Let me count the ways.

Well, it’s been a while since I posted. The winter has been a long one, and it’s not finished yet. We had yet another snowfall last weekend and the low temperatures create sheets of ice for the morning trip to nursery school. We’ve been spending a lot of time at home, playing with things with wheels and reading lots of books. We have built lots of train tracks and developed a few towns. What we haven’t done it a lot of craft activities. However, I started to realise, once again, that my ideas of creativity are not always the same as my childrens’ and that there are many many ways to use your imagination.

Two Boys with a Bus

Nursery school has been the biggest change for us recently. B’s first day was at the beginning of September last year and our schedule had to be worked around that. He was so tired every afternoon that he wasn’t really in the best mood for anything crafty. In addition, his main interest has been pretend play. He loves cars and trains and buses. He spends hours a week driving them around his room making up stories.

Little R is walking now and ready for anything! I have done some painting with him and we sometimes experiment with different materials, trying to build things with them. But I really haven’t done as much creative work with him as I did with B. Partly because he is one of two so there is always another little boy to look out for, who doesn’t like doing messy creative things, and partly because he is much more unpredictable than B. He sees his big 3 year old brother pushing the boundries and he copies everything. Not a great situation for experimenting with paint!

While I love to paint, cut and glue, B has been showing me how driving cars and building train tracks is also good for, if not better for, his creativity and imagination skills. Watching him work and helping him solve problems has been an education for me as he develops his language, refines his co-ordination and practices telling stories.

Introducing R to paint and glue is going to be on my list over the next few months. When he plays with his big brother he gets lots of practice pushing things around and making loud siren noises. I think we’ll add some colour to the playroom walls to reflect their big bright personalities.

So we have lots to do, and lots of opportunities to take photos and fill my blog posts with great pictures!

B with one of his favourite things - the Berlin U-Bahn

Matching and Measuring with Toy Vehicles

I’m always on the hunt for activities involving vehicles. Although I love watching my son drive them around while making up stories, I like to encourage other play too. He has enjoyed matching things for a while now, and has recently become very interested in ‘bigger’ and ‘smaller‘, so when I found a matching and sizing game with circles on one of my favourite sites: Irresistible Ideas for play based learning. I couldn’t wait to give it a go and then try to involve his cars.

First he helped me choose an assortment of vehicles of different sizes. This took a while as we talked about how to measure them and how many we needed to fit onto a piece of A3 paper. After sorting, measuring and arranging we ended up with 13 vehicles.

The Chosen Cars

Then he watched as I drew around them. He enjoyed this as asking for us to draw around things has been a favourite of his for a long time. Thirteen vehicles on one piece of paper was a thing of wonder for him.

After drawing around all the vehicles

I drew with pencil first but then went over it with pen to create a good photo. I did find that I lost some of the detail that the pencil picked up though, so I would definitely draw in pencil next time.

Then I left everything out for him to play with when he wished. I wanted him to have a go straight away, but he was too busy driving the ‘car bus’ (a huge truck he uses to transport cars) as some of the cars had broken down and needed a lift to the mechanic! He did do it eventually, I just had to be patient:

All in place

We had lots of fun with this activity and I can imagine doing it again with other objects. He enjoyed the original circle idea, so we will try other shapes too. Themes would be fun too, like food or painting equipment. Even if we collected random object from around the house or park, I think we would benefit greatly from this simple matching game.

Driving Cars on Corrugated Card

I’m not sure if this is an activity or just a really easy way to fill some time, or both! We started off looking for some cardboard to frame a couple of photos. B chose the corrugated sheet and was immediately engrossed with it. He scratched it, poked at it, twisted it. We had used corrugated card before, but it was a while ago, and I could see a new fascination with it.

It seemed counterintuitive to stand and watch or give comment. So I left him alone. A long while later I found him driving his cars from one end of the room to the other, across the corrugated card to a parking lot on the carpet. He had also drawn on the card since I had left. He looked very happy and completely engrossed in his work.

Later, as I took photos, he told me all about the cars’ journey and how they went bumpity bump across the card.

Completely Engrossed

Bumpity Bump Bump!

Painting with Cars

It’s always all about the cars, and then the bus gets involved and then the train shows up. No matter what we do, something with wheels either accompanies us or distracts us. So one day, to avoid distraction, we painted with cars. It was a huge success. It created an interesting piece of art too.

We have a large plastic table cloth, around 1 by 1.5 meters, which we have been using for a long time for just about anything. We like to work on the floor and this large white water-resistant mat has been our canvas for paint, play dough, colouring, cutting, water play and more. On this day it really was our canvas, and I also discovered that the pizza boxes I had thought perfect for painting on were just too small. This boy thinks big and needs a lot of space.

So, with one plastic sheet, paint and a few vehicles, he was off.

First he assigned two colours to each vehicle...

and then watched the paint move and mix as the buses travelled.

 I gave him one rule: Stay on the mat.

There were some amazing patterns in the tracks. He just kept on going round and round and round.

With cars, colours and a clear limit he was happy to make a creative mess. I left him to it.

This is the finished picture.

A few days later we added more paint (and a few more cars!):

The next time he asked if he could stand in the paint. He had a wonderful time ‘ice skating’ across his painting.

(Pic to come)

We plan to keep adding and adding to it.
So, what was the benefit of this mess?

• Practicing lots of fine and gross motor skills
• Watching colours mix and mix again
• Observing the effect of an solid object moved through liquid
• Enjoying creating a big piece of art with his most beloved vehicles

Underground Train

We live in a big city with an underground train. My son loves it. He loves anything associated with trains. He must spend 90 percent of his time playing alone ordering his trains, cars and buses around the room. I decided to do something to add to his playtime which we could work on together. So we built our own U-Bahn (underground train in Berlin).

A while ago I spent an early Saturday morning drawing on a dissembled cardboard box to make a road and car park for all his cars. We took this, some empty toilet rolls and some tape, and started talking about how to go about it. It took a while to put enough rolls in place (it was a big box), and I had to do most of the work as it was a little tricky for a two year old. He started playing with something else in the room as I finished, but once I was done he was very pleased with his new toy.

The rolls looked a little like the pillars we see in some stations, and it was pretty dark under the cardboard so it looked quite realistic. It was a little wobbly, but this made him think carefully about his movements in and around the structure. The road on top became the way into the space inside the train track, where there was a shopping centre and a bus stop, according to him.

I loved watching him move around - on tiptoe, bending this way and that, peeking through the tunnel, reaching in to move the train. He made up a story about a man in a van. All in all, he practiced quite a few skills. These are some I noted:

• He used his limbs in different ways developing his fine and gross motor skills.
• He created stories by himself expanding his imagination and vocabulary.
• He watched me make a whole new level to his play area with a bit of card and some tape increasing his capacity for creative thinking.

We spent the next few days improving on the underground train to make it stronger and more adaptable to changes in the track.