Creative Confidence – Create an Art Challenge Area

Having creative confidence is trusting and valuing each and every one of your ideas and taking creative risks.

In the Art Studio this is goal #1 – to instill creative confidence in every visitor that walks through the door – no matter what the project is, what medium we are exploring, or what collaborative project we are constructing.

Each month there is a new idea posted about how to instill creative confidence in children at home and in the classroom posted by myself and other museum educators.

Idea 5 – Create an Art Challenge Area

Children need physical, social, moral and intellectual risks and challenges according to writer Margaret Edgington .

Creating an Art Challenge Area will promote plenty of intellectual risk taking by inviting your child to try out new ideas, solve problems, and be resourceful, inventive and creative.

A few things to keep in mind when setting up your challenge area and the format of the challenges:

• Make sure the challenges are FUN! This will ensure that your children stay interested and motivated  with each of the challenges. 
• Use different materials for each challenge: cheerios, tooth picks, old magazines, yarn, etc. – providing a variety of materials can create very different art challenges.
• Vary the goals of the challenges – make some of them more open ended (“What can you make with…”); and have some of them offer a more specific (but still open to creativity) goal (“Create something that can hold 5 pencils and 3 bouncy balls”).
• Make sure your child has plenty of time to complete the challenge – don’t put a time limit on it unless it is incorporated into the challenge itself.
• Think about function – what would be useful to your child? A pencil holder, a book carrier, a key chain? Have the goal be to create one of these things out of something usual or unusual! At the end your child will have something that they can actually use.
• You want your child to be successful, but challenged at the same time – remember this! The noted University of Chicago psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi  believes that this relationship challenges and motivates children by enabling them to see that if they push themselves a bit beyond what they believe themselves capable of and persevere in the face of those achievement demands, they will be successful.

A few sample challenge ideas:

• Draw or paint something you see every day on your way to school.
• Cover an entire sheet of paper with old magazine pictures – they must all be shades of yellow.
• Make something you can wear.
• Make a bed for an animal you might see outside your window.
• Create a drawing of all different types of lines – there should be no white left on your paper by the end!
• Design a new type of shoe for babies to wear using everything in a provided box/bag.

Remember: have fun, take risks, try out new ideas, solve problems, and be resourceful, inventive and creative.

Teaching Expertise

http://www.teachingexpertise.com/articles/supporting-young-children-to-engage-with-risk-and-challenge-2089

Some great sites with more challenges:

PBS

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/buildingbig/educator/act_cha_ei.html

The Artful Parent

http://www.artfulparent.com/2012/03/hole-challenge-art-with-stickers-an-easy-kids-art-project.html

The Art of Education

http://www.theartofed.com/2012/12/11/give-your-students-a-winter-break-art-challenge/

Fear Not Science!

Raise your hand if you don’t like science, or think you’re not very good at it, or think it’s really hard or that you have to be incredibly smart to do it.  Or anything else that might be called a less-than-positive opinion of science.  OK, put your hands down.

Science gets a bad rap.  This is mainly due to the way it is taught in school; many of you probably think back to your science classes and remember memorizing a whole bunch of formulae and vocabulary.  But that’s not science. It’s not fun either. If you look up “science” in the dictionary, it says something like “knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation.”  The italics are mine. We gain knowledge by asking questions and then looking at and messing around with the things around us. Sound like anyone you know? Someone under the age of 5, perhaps?

Out of Order Alphabet

Artist Janet Kawada installs
“K is for Kites”

“K” and “Q” joined our window alphabet this past week, which means we are nearly halfway through our ABCs!

Just a glimpse of Philippe Lejeune’s “Q is for Questioning”

Take a look at descriptions of the letters we have so far, and photographs of these windows below. Can you match up the title and artist with the objects and work in the window?

Modes of Music Programming: Experiment

For Boston Children’s Museum’s recent Family Fest I had the pleasure of working with four different music presenters all in one day!  They were a fabulously diverse line-up and exemplified the aspects of music-making that we try to emphasize in our regular performing arts programming.  Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting about these presenters, the experiences they provided, other ways we provide music programs at the Museum and how you can provide similar experiences for your children at home.

Friendship in Young Children

Tasty Tuesday’s topic in May is “Friendship,” which is also the Museum’s centennial theme in May. At Boston Children’s Museum, we see a lot of positive interactions among our little visitors. For example, at the emergency exit at the top of the Climber, there are times when a child gets scared to climb down. Often, another child will come along and kindly reassure the other child and offer a hand so they can climb down together. I often ask their grownups if these children know each other, and many times the answer is, “No, they just met here in the Climber.”

Creative Confidence – Go the extra mile

Having creative confidence is trusting and valuing each and every one of your ideas and taking creative risks.

In the Art Studio this is goal #1 – to instill creative confidence in every visitor that walks through the door – no matter what the project is, what medium we are exploring, or what collaborative project we are constructing.

Each month there is a new idea posted about how to instill creative confidence in children at home and in the classroom posted by myself and other museum educators.

Idea 4 – Go the extra mile – follow your child’s interest (and do it for free!)

Brain Building and Hugging

Maybe you saw our signs last week asking, “Are you a brain builder?” or maybe you saw the little yellow feet that tracked a path from PlaySpace into Peep into Countdown to Kindergarten? Or maybe, a Boston Children’s Museum staffer handed you a button to wear after they observed you having a meaningful moment with your child.

Last week was officially the Week of the Young Child and we planned a Brain Building in Progress campaign to help raise awareness of the importance of the first few years of a child’s development to their future success – and our region’s future workforce and prosperity. And then some bombs went off. We spent the week providing a safe haven for young children and their families as our Boston community dealt with the anxiety and fear that hung over our city.  Brain building didn’t really matter. Hugging mattered.

A Week of Coming Together

This week has been agonizing for all of us, and especially for parents and caregivers trying to protect children from the terrifying events of the past week. The Museum web site has offered advice to parents on how best to support children:  1) providing honest information but in broad strokes in terms understandable to a child; 2) avoiding frightening TV images; 3) avoiding detailed discussions by older family members in front of children; 4) reassuring children about their parents’ safety and ability to care for them and reminding them of the abundance of helpful people in our community who care for all of us.

Equally important, the Museum has taken care of adults.  We have supported our own staff emotionally and have reached out to first responders, health care providers and their families to offer free admission so that they have a place of respite to recover from their own stress.

We all admire the resiliency of Bostonians, the courage of helpers at the Marathon finish line, the heroism and dedication of our first responders and health care providers, and the leadership of our President, Governor, Mayor and public safety officials.

We only wish that Congress had the courage and wisdom to pass common sense gun safety legislation this week to protect our children and that our state legislature paid as much attention to supporting early childhood services as they did to transportation.  Hopefully, we can convince them to honor Boston’s children and to change their minds and celebrate all the courage, compassion and tolerance Bostonians demonstrated this week.

From me, and from all of the staff at Boston Children’s Museum, we wish you and the entire city of Boston well as we all recover and move forward.

Talking To Children After Tragedy

We are all in shock as we await news of the more than 100 victims of this unimaginable tragedy in Boston. Our hearts go out to you and your families, and we pray for your healing.

It can be difficult to make sense of events like this and to explain them to our children.  Some of you may be seeking information about how to talk with your children about tragedy. We wanted to share this informative blog post from the Boston Children’s Hospital Pediatric Health Blog written by Claire McCarthy, MD:

http://childrenshospitalblog.org/talking-to-children-after-tragedy.

From all of us here at Boston Children’s Museum, we wish you and your families the best.

The Power of Pretend Play

Boston Children’s Museum is celebrating its centennial.  We have monthly themes for the celebration. April’s theme is “Imagination,” and Tasty Tuesday’s topic in April is pretend play. 

Pretend play has very important functions for the development of children’s minds. Is there a common theme that your child likes to pretend? Has there been a moment when you were not comfortable with what your child was pretending? You might get a sneak peak at your child’s world through her pretend play. It could be very different from how you see the world.