Page 5 Creativity and how to support it at home Why is it important to teach our children to be creative? What is creativity? Creativity is taking the ideas from your imagination and turning them into reality. Employers around the world, like Richard Branson’s Virgin Companies, Hewlett Packard and IBM value creativity as a top skill in an employee. Of more than 5,000 executives surveyed world-wide by Forbes magazine, creativity was found to be one of the top three skills that companies look for in an employee. Knowing this, how can we teach creativity to our children? The new BC Curriculum includes creative thinking as one of the core competencies. Students are given more opportunities to build their creative skills and experience the creative process from kindergarten to Gr. 12. “The development” of creative thinking begins within families as they encourage the play of babies and toddlers before the children enter preschool or school settings. The capacity for creative thinking expands at every level of life and schooling as individuals increase their range of ideas and concepts to recombine them into new ideas.” Creative Thinking Competency Profiles New BC Curriculum How can we build this skill at home? We can capture children’s creativity by getting them to solve real world problems, by instilling curiosity, and by keeping it playful. If children are driven by curiosity and given opportunity to play, they are more likely to be engaged and see a problem through to fruition. Avoid giving them a task; instead let them find a gnarly problem and allow them to be adventurous in solving it. What are some problems that students in your school want to solve to better their world, community, school or family? Problem solving takes guts, risks and vulnerability: many experiences we haven’t traditionally asked our kids to practice.