Creativity is a skill that many adults don’t feel they have. It is hard for them to imagine things outside of the box. Being a creative person doesn’t have to be a challenge and it isn’t something that you can’t learn. Helping your children develop a creative side is very beneficial and can help them be more creative in adulthood.
Creative play is an important part of your child’s growth and development. This is something that can help them learn and develop new skills that they will use throughout their lifetime. Encouraging creativity and creative play in your young children can help them throughout their development.
At Growing Kids Learning Centers, we encourage our students to use their creative side and take part in creative play. We know the benefits that creativity can provide your children and how it can boost their development. In this blog, we are going to talk about the importance of creative play and how it can benefit your child’s development.
What Is Creative Play?
Creative play is honestly just children being children. When they create different scenarios and act them out or use their toys to create a story, this is them engaging in creative play. While children can play creatively on their own, nowadays, technology often takes over their attention, which can kill creativity. It is important for you to encourage your child to play creatively and give them the tools to do so. These tools include open-ended toys, such as blocks, clay, and other similar toys, as well as arts and craft items.
Benefits of Creative Play
Creative play can help your child with a variety of different developmental skills. While many parents think creativity just allows children to be imaginative, it actually can help in every aspect of their development.
Emotional Development
When children take part in creative play, they are able to improve their emotional skills. Creative play often leads to children making up scenarios, stories, and other games, which can often help them work through feelings and emotions. While children may not know how to express their own feelings, they may have an easier time doing it through their action figures or dolls. In our previous blog, we discussed how to teach your child about their emotions. Allowing them to play creatively is one additional way to help your child explore and express their emotions. Creative activities give your child a positive outlet for expressing their emotions.
Social Development
Creative play also allows children to interact with others and learn different social skills. When your child plays dress up or even does arts and crafts with other children, they will be able to learn how to communicate with others and socialize in a fun and unique way. Even if your child is playing alone, creative play can allow them to learn how to socialize with others. If your child is playing with their action figures alone, they will likely have them converse, allowing your child to practice conversation and learn how they would respond when talking with others.
Language Development
As we just mentioned, creative play allows your child to interact with others for practice conversations through their toys. This allows them to build a bigger vocabulary and develop better communication skills. They will develop language skills as they play!
Cognitive Development
Your kiddo will also be able to develop their intellectual skills through creative play. They will have several opportunities to practice problem-solving skills and start to learn more about language, cause and effect, and so much more. Creativity can lead to curiosity which can lead to your child learning more about different things that interest them. Your child will be able to develop math skills, reading skills, thinking skills, and many other cognitive skills. Creative play and different creative activities can help your young kiddo develop more intellectual skills.
Motor Development
Creative play can help your child develop their motor skills as well. Arts and crafts and other similar activities will allow your child to develop their fine motor skills. From cutting paper to using a paintbrush, your child will be able to continue working on their fine motor skills. When your child plays dress up or pretends to be a pilot, running and jumping around in the backyard, they will be developing their gross motor skills more. Your child will be able to develop motor skills and improve their physical abilities and movements.
Through creative play, your child will be able to learn a lot and continue to develop a number of different skills. Plus, creative play can help them remain creative as they grow older, which is a skill many adults wish they still had. Be sure to encourage creativity in your children and provide them with ideas and the things they need to be creative.
Ideas For Creative Play
Before we talk about ways to encourage creative play in your child, it is important that you try not to stifle their creativity. Parents often, accidentally, put a stop to children’s creativity because they fear that their child doesn’t know what is real. While this is a normal thing to do, try to recognize when they are being creative and when they actually don’t know. This will allow them to practice creativity and feel encouraged to use their imagination.
There are many different things you can do as a parent to help encourage and stimulate your child’s creativity. Read on for some fun ideas!
Get The Right Toys
As we already mentioned, getting your child toys they can be creative with or do crafts with is a great way to encourage creativity. Try to avoid video games and other toys that take all the creativity out of play. While some of those toys are fine, try to provide your child with more toys that allow them to use their imagination.
Encourage Invented Scenarios
Kids are great at making up scenarios as they play. Whether they pretend they are an explorer traveling through the jungle or they are a fireman saving all of their stuffed animals from a burning building, this type of play allows your child to try different roles and characters, which allow them to learn verbal and social skills. To encourage your child to create new and fun scenarios add dress-up clothes, puppets, and other toys to their collection. Let them lead your playtime and play along with whatever scenario they come up with. You could even try adding to the made-up scenario to show them that adults can be creative too!
Do Arts And Crafts
Arts and crafts are a great way to encourage your kiddo to be creative. Rather than choosing one craft to do and helping them do it, provide them with a huge collection of arts and crafts supplies and let them create whatever they want. Allowing your child to create anything they want allows their creative juices to flow. If they need ideas, give them a very broad idea rather than an actual project. Tell them to create a new animal, invent something they wish existed, or something else that allows them to truly be creative.
Explore Nature
Nature is a unique and beautiful thing. When children have time to explore nature and the everchanging sceneries, they are likely to discover new things that can help boost their creativity. Ask them questions about the great outdoors that they can answer creatively. Nature causes children to think and explore, which can help boost their creative thinking.
Let Them Be
When you just allow your children to spend time doing their own thing, without interfering, your child will likely begin to think creatively and start to imagine. Allowing your child to simply be a child is a great way to allow for creativity. Give them time to do whatever they want, that isn’t sitting in front of a TV screen. They will use their imagination and creativity to entertain themselves.
There are many benefits that creativity can provide and many ways to encourage it in your children. Be sure to encourage your child to be creative and use their imagination daily to allow them to start developing new skills and learn! You may even learn a thing or two about being creative yourself! Enroll your child at one of our Growing Kids Learning Centers locations where they will be able to use their imagination and be creative daily! Contact us to learn more and get your questions answered.
