When children play, they often create a mess, but what a beautiful mess it is! "Creating a Beautiful Mess" describes the ten most important play experiences all children enjoy and how these experiences support learning, creativity, and social connections. These broad categories of play include building with blocks, pretending and make…

Imaginative play can enhance preschoolers' oral language when the child's internal control is strenghtened, external reality is suspended, and motivation exists to become involved. The caregiver provides cues in the arrangement of the environment and selection of materials. Cues can encourage dramatic as well as sociodramatic play. (CL)

Presents a series of classroom exercises and activities that stimulate children's creativity through the use of visualization. Discusses procedures for guided imagery and offers some examples of "trips" to imaginary places. Proposes visualization as a warm-up exercise before art lessons. (DR)

Describes an incident in an experimental school where use of children's imagination and creativity are utilized to overcome pupil boredom. (SL)

Presents a series of exercises that can be used with any age level to stimulate visioning skills (e.g., dreaming, creating, intuiting, and imaging). The exercises focus on building imagination skills, guided imaging, envisioning the future that students would prefer, and creating a futures wheel. (DMM)

It is suggested that coming up with fresh and interesting ideas for college and university publications requires keeping an open mind to events, people, and surroundings, finding good writers, and planning interesting layouts with illustrations. (MSE)

The article describes two one-hour sessions in image making, which serves as the foundation of the creative language arts program used by the author in teaching poetry and writing to children (grades K through 5). (SBH)

Seven principles are presented for improving creative thinking, based on assumptions of creativity as a perceptual shift resulting from a metamorphic mental image. Principles include (1) the future initiates and pulls creative thought; (2) initial fact finding is best postponed; (3) problem redefinition is often retrospective; and (4) metaphors…

This study evaluated the use of guided imagery practice to enhance creative writing with 43 academically gifted students (stratified as either high or low creativity) in grades 3 and 4. Groups receiving the guided imagery practice (regardless of original creativity level) generated more original writing, which contained more sensory descriptions…

This book provides an overview of the creative problem-solving process and exercises to put the process the work. The illustrated, reproducible pages guide students through each step of the problem-solving process by using evaluation grids to track their ideas, solutions, and plans. The activities can be used in a variety of ways including for the…

Describes activities in which K-12 social studies students (1) imagine the consequences of decisions and policies, and (2) imagine the consequences of new personal and social possibilities. Sample activities are offered for geography, world history, sociology, U.S. history, and civics. The authors include suggestions for student evaluation and…

Described are ways in which a classroom teacher may recognize creativity's primary processes in the behavior of children. Suggestions are made for developing creative learning activities in the classroom. (CS)

Argues for an understanding of play as a flux between the imagination and attempts to test consequences of "what if" questions. Discusses leading educational theorists' views of the role of play. Suggests that school authority which reduces creative play closes off children's means of finding answers to some vocational questions. (SG)

Learning through the arts has the potential to stimulate open ended activity that encourages discovery, exploration, experimentation and invention, thus contributing to children's development in all areas of learning and helping to make the curriculum meaningful to them. In this book, the author draws on her extensive experience of promoting young…

In an attempt to find out more about how creative people engage in thinking, more than 50 men and women considered to be prominant in the humanities, the arts, and the sciences were interviewed. Letters, diaries and autobiographies of other creative individuals were examined in an effort to provide a broad base for studying the psychology of…