Creativity in Primary Education

creativity in primary education

Greetings bloggers, today I will be discussing creativity in primary education, I will be discussing the importance of creativity and what it means to be creative. Generally, we associate the term creativity or being creative as doing this like painting and making things, but in reality, creativity can be a very complicated subject, it stems a lot deeper than just arts and crafts. When talking about the definition of creativity many theorists believe that creativity at its core is a process of problem solving, building bridges between pieces of information in order to be more productive; Maslow said that he observes no correlation between psychological health and productive achievement when it comes to creativity. What I take from Maslow’s statement is that creativity (not exclusively within regards children) doesn’t mean there is a problem that needs to be solved, you can be creative just for creativities sake, not everything a child does has to be for a reason, its innate for children to play and be creative without reason to.

In primary school, the main creative subjects are art and music, I will now talk more in depth about these subjects and where they fit in the curriculum

Music

Music can be seen as a controversial subject, it is not uncommon for some arguably close minded people to believe that it is a useless subject and its allocated time should be replaced by the core subjects, although I believe that music teaches you very useful transferrable skills you can use in other subjects, as well as it being a good way to express yourself and therefore, benefit your mental health. Music also plays a massive role in Wales’s rich history and it should be something we are proud of.

I discussed in my last blog about cross curricular learning and how important and beneficial it can be, in summary cross curricular learning is all about incorporating many different subjects and skills into one lesson, and I believe music is the perfect subject for cross curricular learning as it can be combined with any subject, allow me to elaborate:

History- Learning about the history of certain genres of music such as folk music would be a brilliant way to develop music understanding, as well as learning about what living in a certain period of time was like.

Geography- Learning about a musical instruments country of origin would be an excellent way to learn more about specific instruments and about different cultures around the world.

Maths- I think maths is an excellent partner with music, when I got to A level music I used maths all the time, specifically with the way I composed music, any time I composed a piece I would first figure out a time signature and then play around with different note length and I often had to calculate beforehand how many of a certain note I could fit into a bar which may sound simple but was very tedious.

English- English may be the most obvious subject to combine music with, I remember in primary school learning about poetry and we were given a melody that we had to listen to and the sing a poem to that melody, that memory really stands out in my mind as I remember there being no rules other than to create a set of lyrics for a melody.

Science- I did work experience in a primary school when I was doing and on my first day at lunch time the teacher I was shadowing asked me if I would like to give a science lesson and if so what would I do it on, I then had the idea of teaching the class about frequencies and pitch, so I then proposed a lesson where I would get strings of elastic and then have a sort of experiment where the children would pull the elastic and pluck it to simulate a guitar and then add in variables such as pinching the elastic at a certain part and changing the thingness of the elastic, I also taught the science behind putting the ruler on the edge of the table and flicking it. It may seem like I’m going off topic but I just remember that day so well and how engaged the children got with the lesson I think it would be a great addition to the curriculum if cross curricular learning was more common.

ICT- this is a very good subject to combine with music as I remember in my A level days most of the music I composed was on a computer using a program called Sibelius, although a couple weeks ago I attended the workshop with St Nicholas school where I worked with 2 boys who taught me how to use garage band as I have never used it and I remember how engaged and excited they were to be the ones teaching me.

Overall, I’m a strong believer that music is a very good medium to express yourself and should not only be used to exercise creativity, but as an opportunity to really experiment with cross curricular learning.

Art and design

Art and design go hand in hand together, they’re both about combining different shapes, using different mediums and experimenting with different techniques. Art is a perfect way of pushing a child’s creativity to the limit, if you supply a child with the resources they will create something they are passionate about, I remember my little brother used to be obsessed with drawing dinosaurs and that’s all he would do. A work of art is able to have such an effect on people’s social consciousnesses only because it has its own internal logic (Vygotsky L 2004), what I take from Vygotsky’s statement here is that art can resonate with us on deep emotional levels because its art is human creativity in its purest form, art has had a massive influence over science and religion in the past, use the renaissance period as an example.

In conclusion, I believe that creativity is a very powerful thing that we still don’t fully understand. I think that it is important that we, instead of ensuring a balance in the curriculum between creative subjects, and less creative subjects, merge the two and push cross curricular learning to the limit!

References

Vygotsky, Lev (2004) ‘Imagination and Creativity in Childhood’ Journal of Russian and East European Psychology 42 (1) pp.7-97 M.E Sharpe, Inc. [Online] Available at: https://learn.cardiffmet.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/564418/mod_resource/content/1/Imagination%20and%20Creativity%20in%20Childhood.pdf (Accessed:11/12/17)

Psychology Today (2013) Maslow on Creativity Available at: https://learn.cardiffmet.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/564418/mod_resource/content/1/Imagination%20and%20Creativity%20in%20Childhood.pdf (Accessed 11/12/17)

Jyrki Reunamo, Hui-Chun Lee, Li-Chen Wang, Inkeri Ruokonen, Teemu Nikkola & Sanna Malmstrom (2014) Children's creativity in day care, Early Child Development and Care, 184 (4), pp.617-632