What Teachers (and Parents) Can Do to Encourage Creativity in Early Childhood Education

U.S. Department of Education, Encouraging Creativity in Early Childhood Classrooms

Given what is known about young children’s learning and about their amazing competence to express their visions of themselves and their world, how can the classroom be modified to best support children’s emerging creativity?

Time

Creativity does not follow the clock. Children need extended, unhurried time to explore and do their best work. They should not be artificially rotated, that is, asked to move to a different learning center or activity when they are still productively engaged and motivated by a piece of creative work.

Space

Children need a place to leave unfinished work to continue the next day, and a space that inspires them to do their best work. A barren, drab environment is not conducive to creative work. Rather, children’s work is fostered by a space that has natural light, harmonious colors, comfortable and child-sized areas, examples of their own and others’ work (not only their classmates’, but as appropriate, also their teachers’ and selected adult artists’), and inviting materials.

Materials

Without spending great amounts of money, teachers can organize wonderful collections of resource materials that might be bought, found, or recycled. These materials can include paper goods of all kinds; writing and drawing tools; materials for construction and collages, such as buttons, stones, shells, beads, and seeds; and sculpting materials, such as play dough, goop, clay, and shaving cream. These materials are used most productively and imaginatively by children when they themselves have helped select, organize, sort, and arrange them.

Climate

The classroom atmosphere should reflect the adults’ encouragement and acceptance of mistakes, risk-taking, innovation, and uniqueness, along with a certain amount of mess, noise, and freedom. This is not a matter of chaos, or of tight control, but instead something in between. In order to create such a climate, teachers must give themselves permission to try artistic activity themselves, even when they have not been so fortunate as to have had formal art training or to feel they are naturally “good at art.” Through workshops, adult education classes, or teamwork with an art teacher or parent, classroom teachers can gain confidence for, and experience the pleasure of, venturing some distance down the road of self-expression in a medium in which they did not know they could be successful. Their skill will then translate into their work with the children.

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