'Creative play' - back to basics

I decided to become a blogger because I want to be a voice among the chorus in a grassroots movement to bring back a focus on creative play for kids and the resulting benefit of that creative play:  imagination.

Imagination gets a bit of a bad rap sometimes.  You've probably heard this at least once:  "that's quite an over-active imagination you've got there" - with that one statement, we attempt to coax a tall tale  back to something resembling the truth, innocent enough... but somehow in the search for truth, we forget to recognize the ingenuity of the imagination that created the story!

Over-active imagination?  Once I believed that was possible....I'm not sure there is such a thing anymore. .. but, I'm starting to wonder if there's been an invasion of the body snatchers, actually!

I suppose I focus on "inspiring imagination through creative play every day" because it adds tremendous value to the lives of children, by creating habits and thought patterns that allow us to be creative, critical thinkers for the rest of our lives - and it takes a village.  After all, we are "children" for only 16 years and "grown up" for the next 70, if we're lucky.

I admit, it's a pretty broad topic:  Inspiration... Imagination... Invention....  it really does encompass a lot of different things, but that's intentional.  I'm usually very good at putting things into little compartments and labeling them.  Here, I am specifically trying NOT to do that.

Creativity is different for everyone.  We all experience it differently and act on it differently.  Personally, I enjoy the excitement that a blank page offers me.  I love that I can create anything I want with that page, with the ideas I put out there, the colours I choose and even the words I use to do it.  I look forward to it when colouring with crayons, when scrap booking, when designing an ad, when pretending to write the next great novel....  For me, my blog itself, is a very creative process, as is the outcome and so, I am intentionally not limiting it to one idea.

And, I don't like to use the words Inspire and Imagine interchangeably because they are different - one is the spark of the idea and the other the development of the idea to the ultimate Invention (the physical culmination of that inspired imagination that you can share with others!).   I see the creative process as this very simple equation:  Inspire...Imagine...Invent!

I believe that creative 'play' inspires imagination  -  I didn't just invent the wheel with that statement - I am not alone, nor am I the first to realize imagination and creativity are crucial life skills for success - this is a well discussed subject among the "thinkers" of our world and many great companies have spent trillions of dollars developing toys that will help develop it (still others have spent trillions more developing toys that will KILL it too, but...).   Maybe what isn't so clear though is what we [the royal we] mean by creative play:

Creative play is any type of play that uses your right brain self (the creative side, not the logic side).  So that could be anything from drawing, to skipping, to cloud watching, to singing, to playing house, to dancing, to make-believe play, to building a boxed model (you get to pick the colours you paint it!), to playing an instrument or banging pots and pans to decorating cookies (baking them is left brained though!) to....well, I think you get the picture.

All these and more are creative play: there are a myriad ways to include some creative play each and every day.  They are kids, after all, and kids should play. 

Being imaginative and creative and active help a child develop their sense of self and confidence, to be flexible and to find solutions, to ask what's possible and to respect other ideas.

My plan for this space, is to create a 'full-service', interactive, one-stop creativity "shop"!  We've launched our Tips page today and have plans to ad Activities later this week.  These pages will be full of all kinds of ideas, links and downloads with great ideas for creative play with your kids.  We'll get there.  Everything evolves, and as we grow here, so will the ideas we share and the topics we cover.  Just know this - you can always count on me to be honest about whatever I present here, to not blatantly try to sell you a product (but to do reviews and giveaways still!), and to always relate everything back in some way to creativity for kids.  (true, sometimes it may not be obvious how it's related, this is a blog, after all! A little interjection and retrospective is expected now and then, isn't it?  But I'll always connect the dots!)

Until next time:  Inspire...imagine...invent!