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…

Purpose: Across mainstream educational leadership literature, the term vision has had two primary definitions: (a) a leader?s image of the future and (b) change goals. Translating vision into practice has become increasingly difficult, however, as educators have been bombarded with conflicting images and goals for schools. This article is…

This book is a sequel to the book "Scamper" by the same author and builds upon the ideas of imagination development introduced in the first book. SCAMPER is an acronym with each of the seven letters serving as the initial letter or word phrases that form an idea-spurring checklist. The checklist provokes children's minds and spurs the production…

From the notion that people construct their realities, it follows that people are writers of the texts that they experience and call life, although in some scenes people may have greater or lesser authorship. In schools and educational systems, administrators have the power to write other persons' narratives. In creating educational texts, the…

Theories of creative writing have been for the most part bound up with theories of art. Both teachers and the general public, however, are dissatisfied with such institutionalized theories. Creative writers should first look to theories of writing rather than infer them from art. Recent composition theories, both cognitive theories and those of…

An art activity introduces intermediate grade and middle school students to optical illusions. Students practice drawing geometric shapes such as cubes, cylinders, cones, and pyramids, then combine these shapes to create the illusion of their choice. Graphic outlines for each shape are provided. This document is one of a collection of materials…

Imaging is creating a material picture in the mind that a person can scan as he or she would scan a real current event in the environment. The concept of imaging offers a way of explaining intrapersonal communication, the process of talking to oneself. Imaging also offers a useful way of looking at the role of language in intrapersonal…

If education is concerned with imagination, it is important to know how educators perceive the term. For this purpose, an attempt was made to categorize ways in which teachers conceptualize imagination. Responses were obtained in a survey from 120 teachers who were registered in a graduate course on creative thinking. Participants ranged in age…

The purpose of this study was to determine if the use of classroom activities to enhance children's imaginations could improve their creative abilities. Subjects included 25 fifth-grade students in the Grand Forks, North Dakota, school district. Students were given the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking and were provided with materials designed…

Expressing the imagination dramatically is a step toward refining and shaping thought and behavior. Imagination is a part of the complex interaction of thought and action and has a place in the knowledge base. Drama is a direct expression of the imagination in action. In drama, the thought--the imaginings--are expressed in action and that action…

The similarities between television viewing and fantasy activity (daydreaming, reverie, mind-wandering, internal dialogue) more than warrant the building of a theoretical construct, especially in the context of recent empirical research on television viewing consequences. A construct of the television viewing process, based on cognitive theories…

This study investigates the effects of social relationships curricula and sex differences on reading readiness and imaginativeness. The subjects were ninety-six 5-year-olds from four kindergarten classrooms. In the pre- and post-assessment phase of the study the children were administered the Gates MacGinitie Reading Readiness Skills Test and the…

PREPARING CHILDREN TO WRITE BY TAKING THEM OUT OF THE CLASSROOM TO SHARE EXPERIENCES IS A RESPECTED PRACTICE IN SOME ENGLISH PRIMARY SCHOOLS. SINCE A TEACHER CANNOT PREDICT WITH CERTAINTY WHEN A CHILD WILL BE READY FOR WRITTEN EXPRESSION, HE MUST REPEATEDLY ENCOURAGE THE CHILD TO SHARE, TO TALK OVER, AND LATER--WHEN THE MOMENT OF EXPRESSION…

An account of an "intensive writing" experiment to stimulate and teach secondary students to write freely and creatively is given in this book. The experimental teaching method which stresses emotion, brevity, simplicity, and honesty is described, as well as the stimulus used for each writing lesson, the results obtained, and the children's…

Even in higher education there is a disjunction between the realities of Monday morning--with its budget crunches, operational constraints, and internecine squabbles--and the world of the imagination. However, the separation of the two realms is neither necessary nor helpful. The focus of this point of view is on the problems and potentials of…