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…

This paper discusses reasons why oral storytelling is a useful technique and presents step-by-step instructions for how to tell a story. Among the advantages discussed are: immediacy, relevancy, versatility, lack of visual stimuli to limit conceptualization, and eye contact. Techniques are presented for three components of the storytelling…

The ideas in this workbook for stimulating children's creative thinking are presented as integral parts of ten stories about a boy named Dudley Bond (a distant relative of a very famous spy), his friend Max (a professional bear), and his cousin Maybelle. They find their imaginations stretched by a backyard scientist-inventor who knows dozens of…

As one component of the Special Arts Project and designed to stimulate the use of creative drama in the classroom, this booklet describes 26 topics for classroom dramatic activities. Examples of topics are slow-motion techniques, simultaneous conversation, magic strings, making an object real, texture walk, word toss, tag freezes, and changing…

Reviews research indicating that children's writing moves in an age-related sequence from the literal and factual to the metaphorical and affective and shows a growth in awareness of the psychological characteristics of the self and others. Presents an analysis of children's stories that provides guidelines for teachers and researchers to use in…

Students can see more in motion picture and television productions once they realize that they are already quite knowledgeable, and these ten discovery-experience lesson units on film and television productions provide teachers with a means to let them discover for themselves that they already know several characteristics of the moving media as…

This occupational skills instructional module on using creativity at work is one of twelve making up a curriculum guide on the human aspects of working in organizations. The modules are designed for utilization at various educational levels ranging from high school to adult and continuing education, in either academic or vocational programs. This…

This guide for parents discusses social competence in 2-year-old children, drawing upon anecdotal data to provide a sampling of 2-year-old children's social behavior and their parents' child rearing techniques. The data were collected from questionnaires, telephone interviews, and home visits in a 12-month study of the interactions of 86…

This ideabook, designed to aid parents and teachers in developing the preschool child's powers of creative thinking and self-expression, suggests 50 ideas and activities for stimulating creativity in preschool children. The entries are presented in five chapters: (1) Viewing the World with Wonder and Open Eyes; (2) Natural Artistic Talent; (3)…

The learning activities in this handbook were taken directly from Tucson Early Education Model (TEEM) classrooms and designed to foster intellectual and language development. More specifically, these activities are designed to foster linguistic awareness, sensory perception, curiosity, and imagination, to guide the child in differentiating fantasy…

This paper discusses the value of role play in facilitating children's language development and suggests strategies for using role play effectively in early childhood and intermediate classrooms. Role play requires the child (1) to listen and observe peer talk and action and to use language memory, attention and concentration behaviors; (2) to…

Creative dramatics is an art form which enables children under the guidance of an imaginative and responsive adult, to reinforce academic subjects, establish a positive self-image and develop the processes of concentration, analysis, evaluation, inference, and creativity. Designed to assist elementary teachers and administrators, this book does…

This curriculum guide presents objectives, learning activities, evaluation suggestions, and resources for 13 areas related to creative thinking: (1) observing, noticing, and memory stretching; (2) comparing; (3) classifying; (4) developing language through the senses; (5) finding cause and effect relationships; (6) summarizing; (7) looking for…