The Creative Child

Posted by LisaV | 0 comments

Do you have a creative child? While the other Kindergarteners were receiving year-end awards for Best Reader or Best Handwriting, my child won for Most Creative. In first grade, he was dubbed Most Imaginative. As you can imagine, he was the class comedian, keeping everyone entertained throughout the school day.

When we started homeschooling five years ago, I found my then second-grader doodling rather than working the problems on his math papers and daydreaming instead of completing his handwriting assignments. At the start of this school year, my now sixth-grader built a baseball stadium out of his math blocks.

Creative children tend not to fit the mold of traditional school and like to think outside the box (perhaps they don’t even recognize the box!). They’re constantly experimenting with a magnifying glass or bucket of water, trying to invent things out of Legos or Tinkertoys, and telling you that you’re destroying their creativity when they would rather draw Indiana Jones than study.

How do you teach such a child when you are not the same way yourself? I’ve had to learn this over the past five years, as our older son is creative while the younger one is focused. The older one sees in shades of gray, while the younger lives in a world of black and white.

We attempt more active games that involve the hands as well as the heart. We follow a schedule of activities and try to keep both boys on track, with the creative one normally trailing the younger. He’s trained to do chores and study, always asking the deep questions of life. His thoughts are not my thoughts, but much more profound and deeper than any well. We try to follow the creative child’s interests, as he has many that I would never have imagined. He loves to learn on his own, picking up library books on brain science, planets, or archaeology.

We work on the basics, the 3 Rs critical to all future learning. We incorporate experimentation, invention, and exploration into our homeschool days. We learn from each other, how to conform or be our own individual, while gleaning the truths of the Bible.

The creative child helps us think outside our comfort zone and learn to be flexible. Often it’s the creative ones who are the inventors and the builders. May we encourage that creativity by offering our child the freedom he needs to develop the creative ability that God gave him.

Lisa (aka Morning Rose) has been teaching her two elementary-aged sons for four years and incorporating study, work, service, and play into their homeschooling days. She enjoys reading, writing, and photography and blogs publicly at Pockets of Time and privately at Scooter and B.