Good creative
Not everything that is new or different is creative. So how can we encourage the creativity we value?
Novelty alone does not make creativity, for creativity is more than that. Creativity offers new insights that themselves lead on somewhere new, making the world around us a more interesting place.
Thus a sound made by a chair creaking can be new, but most of us in the classroom might call it a distraction – rather than a fine exhibition of creativity.
Yet the rules of creativity are not laid down. So how can a child learn what is not only new, different and unexpected (three of the attributes of a creative piece of work) but also has that something extra, that something special, that makes us call the activity “creative”?
It is a question many have puzzled over, which is why there is now a book which does help children discover the difference between creativity and simple novelty: “Cracking Creative Writing.”
This volume has over 100 creative writing activities, each of which is carefully directed in order to help children develop ideas which are not simply novel but which could also be considered by most people to be truly “creative”.
In order to see how this works we’ve put six full examples from the book on our website. You can download them and use them in your lessons, completely free of charge.
Then if you feel, as we do, that this really is a way of showing children not just how to be more creative, but how to be more creative in a meaningful way, the book can be downloaded, or purchased as a printed volume.
The examples taken from the book are freely available and involve activities such as creating collective nouns, imagining oneself to be an inanimate object, contrasting two utterly different objects, creating the names of pop groups in alphabetical order, writing a nursery rhyme for adults, and so on.
You can find and download all these examples on our website where you will also find more information about the volume.
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