Ensuring your classroom and lesson plans encourage creativity and innovation is essential to children's enjoyment of learning. Providing them with opportunities to be creative and innovative in their assignments and classwork makes learning more fun and gives them alternative ways to learn new material. Here are a few tips on how you can foster creativity and innovation in your classroom:
- Ask questions that encourage students to use their critical thinking skills and/or come up with a solution to a problem. What if this happened? How else could you solve this problem? What's your idea? All of these are great examples of questions you can ask students to help them come up with creative solutions and develop their problem-solving skills.
- Ask students for ideas on how to repurpose everyday items. For example, children can use pieces of newspaper to create a paper airplane, telescope, and hat, or they can make confetti and pompoms. This is a wonderful activity to help children learn the importance of reusing and repurposing items to protect and preserve our planet.
- Assign projects and tasks that incorporate building and engineering. Ask children to use their design skills to create fun, innovative designs that correlate with what they're learning in class. Children can build models of animals and transportation vehicles among other things, or they can come up with their own unique design.
- Encourage students to create drawings, stories, songs, rhymes, and plays related to what they're learning in class. This can help students come up with their own way of learning new skills and concepts. Creating a story or rhyme about a grammar rule or the scientific method can help students better remember what they're supposed to do and when they're supposed to do it.
- Set aside time each week for students to do a self-expression activity. Giving children regular opportunities for self-expression can decrease challenging behavior in the classroom and can also help children learn healthy ways to express their feelings while providing them with a creative outlet.
Browse our website for a variety of art supplies, building materials, and other resources you can use to foster creativity and innovation in your classroom.