An Enlightening 20 minutes about our Children's Future

This is an enlightening speech that Ken Robinson gives regarding our schooling system and children's creativity. He talks about children's creativity being just as important in this day and age as literacy, and that they should be treated with the same status.
Creativity is about having the freedom to explore ideas without judgement. It's about taking risks! - This is where problem solving, original thought and new ideas come from!
He speaks about the need to reassess our school curriculum's - to encourage creativity not squash it. We need to provide an education system that supports and fosters our 21st century learners.

Very Inspiring!

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” - Pablo Picasso.

Abby.

Rocket Ships

Yesterday we read a story about a wee bear who used his imagination to create a rocket ship. This inspired us to make our own rocket ship to blast off to the moon. Today some of the children found a book that showed how to make a rocket ship picture so a small group of children began to make these before early morning mat time. At mat time Ally read another story about a pig who uses his imagination to create a space base and so this inspire more work on the space theme.

Jo

Fashion Designers

Gok, watch out! We have our own little fashion designers at Grasslands Kindergarten. The children dressed the cut out dolls using material scraps. They designed their own outfits. This activity allowed the children to design in their head then select materials, arrange and alter their garments and model them! As you can see they got very creative. Fantastic work tamariki!

There is some debate about whether we should use templates with children because one school of thought is that it can stifle children's creativity and originality. However as we have shown templates can be used to support the development of the children's own original ideas! We just need to think beyond the obvious and get creative as educators!

Jo

To the moon......

Ally read a story at mattime this morning about a bear that used his imagination to journey to the moon in a rocket he built. After mat time Jo spent some time with the children building a rocket to journey to the moon. This sparked lots of creativity in the art area with children creating robots and monsters and moons. Here are a couple of peices of the children's work.

Jeneah's moon.














Alecs's Monster.

Taniwha

Ebony's Cats

At kindergarten we have a variety of resources available to the children to inspire and aid them with their image making. Here Ebony has used our image folder to assist her with her drawings of cats. The folder contains a variety of animals created in a variety of ways - to demonstrate to children that there are numerous ways to draw one specific thing.
Beautiful work Ebony!
Abby.

Daphne's Bag

A collection of the work we have been producing.

We know that our parents are busy people and dont always have the opportunity to spend time in our enviornment admiring the art work, so here is a collection of some of the work our children have been producing. - their creative expression!