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MomsTown Top 3 Play Tips
Power Off. If it has moving pictures, sounds, bells, and whistles, and a joystick, turn it off. Turn off the television and the electronics and watch your kids' creativity and imagination kick in. It's also been our experience that when the television is off our kids fight less. Weird but true. With no television they are forced to play together.
Get tooled. Provide the tools to enhance your child's creativity and imagination. Construction paper, crayons, glue sticks, markers, blocks, LEGO bricks. If kids have the right tools they can create all kinds of imaginative sculptures and artwork.
Get Messy. Let them make a mess. Mud, baking, paint, chalk. It all goes in the bathtub and washing machine anyway. |
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Go Blow Bubbles
Don't be surprised if one day you're stopped at an intersection and the minivan or SUV in front of you has a bumper sticker that reads "My Child is an Outstanding Test-Taker." The standardized testing season is upon us. It’s the season of bubbles, not the soapy fun bubbles, rather the kind of bubbles you fill in with a number 2 pencil. The season is also filled with a lot of stress and anxiety. There is a lot of emphasis these days placed on testing and how well our children score. Wouldn’t it be great if as much attention was paid to their creativity and imagination?
We think so, and we recently had the opportunity to sit on a media panel in New York City. The discussion was hosted by LEGO and the topic was the importance of fostering creativity and imagination in the classroom and the playroom. On the panel with us were some creative “heavy hitters,” including actor Matthew Broderick, Meri Cummings from NASA, Mitch Resnick from MIT, clothing designer Eileen Fisher and the CEO of LEGO Jorgen Vig Knudstorp. Each panel member, successful in their respective industry, all agreed on one thing: Creativity and imagination are important is, unfortunately, being scheduled right out of our children’s lives.
Mitch Resnick, Director of the Lifelong Kindergarten Lab and MIT believes our children would be better served if teachers, administrators, and parents took more academic cues from the kindergarten model. “We’ve been inspired by the way kids learn in kindergarten. People complain a lot about the educational system, and often with good reason. But you generally don’t hear people complain about kindergarten.” Resnick says children learn through play and using their imagination. Kindergarten works. According to Resnick our school system is going in the wrong direction. “Unfortunately, the school system is pushing down and trying to make kindergarten more like the rest of the school system.”
We all know that kindergarten has changed from when we were five-years-old. Back in our day kindergarten was about painting in your dad’s tee-shirt. Today it’s about getting ready for chapter books in the first grade. Matthew Broderick made an observation that we should all take a moment to think about. He says when we were kids baseball was about getting together with a group of kids in the neighborhood, choosing teams and playing. Today, baseball is 40 parents instructing 20 kids on what to do next.
It all begs the question, “What do we do as parents to foster creativity and imagination?” The answer is simple. Back off. We need to let our kids have free time. Our kids deserve unstructured time to play, create, and build their imagination. The moral of the story, go blow bubbles. To hear more about ways to foster creativity and imagination, Mitch Resnick will join us on MomsTown Reality Radio Wednesday morning, May 24 at 11:00. To listen, just go to MomsTown.com. If by chance, you’re out flying kites at that time, no worries, the show will be saved in our archives.
- Heather Reider and Mary Goulet, MomsTown.com founders |
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