Creativity In Primary And Pre-Primary Children

Abstract

Pre-primary period is the most appreciated time because it comprises the most important educational experience of a person’s life. During its evolution, there are developed several features that define human personality, as well as obvious facts that help the individual enlarge his/her personal horizon. The teacher’s task is to find and exploit the creative capacities of the children. Working and developing the children’s creativity also implies knowing their creative potential that intermingles with their intellectual features. The means that the teacher uses in order to educate the children’s creative potential are different. One of them is the freedom of letting them to express themselves in order to discover their creativity thoughts. This might happen when the child knows to connect meanings, to make associations and to find answers to his questions. Each creative act starts with questions that have to be meaningful and reasonable. The question is the one that provokes the creative behavior and the one that leads to the development of the child’s curiosity. The contemporary school, centered on the pupil, is very important in the development of the child’s intelligence and it will ensure a continuous socio human progress. It was always believed that creativity was a feature of the clever people, but, in fact, all we have to do is to be aware of the multitude of the ideas developed by children, their intelligence and creativity being visible since childhood. The products that children create during Romanian language classes are multiple: ideas, tests, projects, literary compositions.

Keywords: Creativityeducationtuitionpupils

Introduction

The essential purpose of tuition is represented by the development of thinking. Therefore, the thinking does not reduce to the informational aspect, but also through teaching it is improved the development of mind and receptivity and the scientific spirit.

For stimulating the creative capacity of pupils, it is important that the teacher possess a creative behaviour that leads the pupils toward curiosity and discovery. Another important aspect might be the teacher’s positive attitude towards the children’s ideas by using an open, assertive, persuasive and credible relationship between pupils and teacher (Cucoş, 1998, p.54).

The teachers have to use active, practical teaching methods that underline the pupil’s activity, such as: heuristic conversation, discussing and debates, solving problems, case study and stimulation, all of these stimulating the children to search, to explore, to think and to use inner stimuli for a creative learning (Ionescu & Radu, 2001, p.36).

The working climate has to be permissive, nonauthoritative and the pupils have to feel free and spontaneous to be able to express their curiosity, initiative and spontaneity

Problem Statement

Creativity has its origins in the Latin word “creare” which means to make, to invent and to give life. Creativity represents the highest level of human behavior, able to train and comprise the other levels of conduct as well as physical features of an individual.

Creativity is needed for being able to realize and actualize the elements in order to shape the world. It is defined through novelty, originality, value, harmony and relevance; it also means courage all that is new, unsure or recusant.

The lack of creativity is due to the incapacity of understanding some phenomena or the feeling of freedom. Creativity represents a way of communication: the child is in a continuous contact with his inner world and with the external one. Curiosity and the desire for knowledge make us receptive to the external world, in this way, the child is in a permanent wonder and surprise, trying to understand the universe.

The pre-school child is a creative person due to his huge curiosity, to his genuine movement and his desire to know everything that happens around him. During the pre-school period, the imagination is expressed vividly through all his activities he undergoes in kindergarten. The pre-school period represents the time when it is essential to stimulate the creative potential of the child and to motivate him to develop his creative potential. The didactic activity has to be understood as a creative act, not as a routine fact.

Creativity, unlike intelligence, represents a universal phenomenon for a child, there is no pre-school child who does not draw or make up stories.

The rigidity of the ideas, disappointment, intimidation, shyness, and secrecy, all of these may restrain the pupils’ creativity. The teacher has the role of encouraging everybody for finding an original solution to the given issues. The shallowness does not have to cause a creative attitude.

Composition and solving problems represent a huge treasure of formative-educative resources, valuable for the development of the creative potential. Linking the classical and modern methods by the most effective teaching strategies, the teacher can instil the pupils with love for literature and logical thinking. In order to stimulate the creative potential of the pupils, the teacher needs to be neutral due to their evolution, to interfere consciously and actively in order to erase the blockade of the objectivity and subjectivity in pupils’ creativity (Moraru, 1997, p.72) .

Each person has the capacity of studying in different ways. For discovering what kind of learning style we possess, all we have to do is thinking about the way we like to learn something new. We enjoy discovering information, abilities, attitudes and emotions. .

Research Questions

The researchers say that people who take part in learning programmes get better grades, their self-esteem rises and they can help themselves in different daily situations, they become independent, the risk of abandoning school decreases. I like children- there is a Picasso in each child, they are creativity ball. I always kept my childish part alive. (Francis Ford Coppola)

The period we live in requires every person to adapt to different situations, to solve social and professional issues, to find clever and original solutions. Through all its aspects, creativity differs itself from artistic and scientific creativity.

Can we study how to be creative?

Purpose of the Study

Schools play an important part in stimulating and discovering of the aptitudes, curiosity and inventive activities. It is very difficult to teach creativity, but it is also very difficult to moderate it. Creativity seems to have a limited part in the educational stream that is why inventivity has to be refined and maintained carefully throughout life. An important aspect of creativity is represented by the blending activity. A relevant exemple is to provoke the pupils to integrate their previous activity into a new pattern, or to discover some connections between thinks and people in a new context. The defining features of creativity are: fluency, flexibility and originality. The fluency of ideas may generate many answers to a given problem in a period of time, the ideas may come from: building sentences with two or many words, which may have the first letters; word puzzle involves finding matching words; expressions or short sentences which may have a certain topic. In order to accomplish the tasks, the pupils have to identify the conceptual relations, to find similar or opposite words, to expand certain words, to choose irrelevant words or to invent new words.

Another kind of thinking that facilitates creativity is the associative thinking, which involves the generating of ideas and new solutions starting from images and different concepts. Creative associations may be: linguistic and imagistic. For being creative, the pupils have also be flexible. Their flexibility depends on finding new utilities for some usual words. There are two kinds of flexibility: spontaneous flexibility and frame flexibility. The teacher’s role might be redefined and might acquire new meanings, exceeding the traditional trend where he was just a supplier of information, overtaking the traditional flow when he becomes a co-partner in the activities that took part in the middle of the pupils. The teacher accompanies and leads the pupils on the way to knowledge. The size of the educational process acquires formative and training values, encouraging the individual, personal and social progress. The creativity, the capacity of realising something new represents a process through which the final educational product is completed. Generally, it represents one person’s ability to solve a problem, no matter its nature or domain, even if this problem is not new for the society, but it is new for the person who confronts it. Unfortunately, not even nowadays, the creativity hasn’t removed synonyms such as: fluent intelligence imposed thinking, creative imagination. The concept of creativity is linked with all the physical issues: thought, perception, attitude, talent involved in the creative evolution.

Research Methods

The pupils involved in an educational, rigid, dominating and unattractive process will not be happy to acquire new and attractive information, will not study just for knowing more, but for obtaining a better result at school. Thus, the didactic games will take part in better educational context and may adumbrate models of stimulating the creativity. There are some criteria that appreciate the creative product. Any action is considered creative if it can undergo two criteria: the originality one and the connection one. The criterium of originality has as fundamental features the novelty and the unpredictibility. The novelty involves a process of sinthesize the existing elements through blending connexions between these items. The unpredictibility refers to the connection between the real world and the created object. Creativity involves the achievement of different products (ideas, objects, images) that do not exist (or did not exist) and sometimes are difficult to anticipate. The childhood world is a games’ world- full of activities. The didactic games may be considered an important spiritual feature because they stay as a background for the creation in itself. Is it often said that clever and creative people are influenced by their childhood experiences: they wish to re-experience the same innocence, the same beauty of the spirit. The development of the ability of accurate expressing, written or spoken, implies the knowledge of teoretical and linguistic fundaments which have as a base communication and its skills. To enlighten these skills in a creative manner represents a real challange for all the subjects at school, especially when teaching Romanian language as a native language. Through communicative skills we can understand developing skills which pupils will be able to understand and express written or spoken messages. The creative learning in the Romanian language lessons represents a special form of studying which has as a final purpose the achievement of some individual or collective behaviors converging towards searching, finding and implementation of the novelty.

Through teaching Romanian language in primary school, teachers may use a complex of objectives, such as: reading accurately, consciously and expressive; learning to write; knowing and using the Romanian language as a real means of oral and written communication; learning to appreciate reading; acquiring skills for composition writing.

Findings

Ana Stoica in” Pupils’ Creativity” from 1983 introduces the term psychopedagogy of creativity. School represents the most important factor in the development of social creativity using heuristically techniques and representing a background for the progress of the creative personality of pupils as well as for their working style (Stoica, 1983, p.213).

Due to the problems linked to creativity in the educational context, one can say that one of the most important issues of contemporary pedagogy is represented by the creative study.

Regarding the creative study, Ion Moraru, in ”Creatology Treaty” from 1998, stated that „creative learning represents that form of learning which in the end obtains individual and collective behaviours in order to achieve and find the originality” (Moraru, 1998, p.305). The creative learning, as a landmark for education, must not be narrow and exclusivist, but able to mingle with other forms of studying such as the fundamental educational ideal.

In the pre-academic stage the creative learning is most important in order to attract the pupil into the wonderful realm of culture and to motivate him to study more, the teacher has to teach something new and interesting through heuristic methods. The pupil has to change his opinion about studying. He does not have to repeat exactly the same words, but to develop his own critical, original thinking, to choose the information he needs in this way being able to come up with new and valuable ideas.

Creativity stands for the aim of psychological background of the individual. It does not represent a success of the human psyche, but a result of a proper organisation of different personality items: cognitive, affectionate, motivational and behavioural. As a conclusion, creativity functions as a result of the whole personality. The creative teachers lead the pupils to develop their creativity in the right way. The explanation might be the transfer of values from teachers to pupils, having as a result the self-development of the child due to his skills and abilities (Nicola, 1981, p.21).

There are a lot of methods through which the creativity is stimulated and expanded: riddles, attention games, puzzles that have words starting or ending in certain letter, writing sentences, team games or practical activities.

The correct meaning of pupils’ creativity is the one of creative potential, elements or predictive abilities that announce the future success. In general, pupils possess a naive and fervid creativity (Vlăsceanu, 1989, p.84).

The creativity of primary pupils represents an essential premise as a source of authenticity and a sign of maturity in which school has a definite part. Ursula Șchiopu defines creativity as a spontaneous inclination for inventing, feature that every person has, no matter the age. Originality is considered by many as the main element of creativity, the creative process being influenced by a positive attitude towards new ideas.

My intention was to comprise some features, mostly the significant ones for the development of creativity to pupils through games, during Romanian language classes, in order to being put into practice (Stoica, 1983, p.52).

The theory I have analysed was that, if the didactic game was used as a method in language and literature classes there would be developed some creative skills and original attempts to solve language problems, all of these generating the revealing of personality traits of the subjects.

Learning writing and reading presupposes a preparatory phase in which are framed movement of sensory abilities, pupils learn letters and then to combine them in a literary structure. As they learn the letters, pupils will organize them into words and then, into sentences. In this first phase, when they learn reading and writing , the pupils will have some difficulties in organizing their space on the paper, due to the sentences on the whiteboard that they have to write in the notebooks, because they have to follow some patterns.

Romanian language classes offer through their content, different possibilities of stimulating and developing the creativity. Starting from the first grade, the games, the images from the pre-writing period, as well as texts from the after writing period, there are moments through which the pupils’ creativity is produced.

The most important subject that develops creativity is the Romanian language. The creative act differs from pupil to pupil, reflecting their intelligence and creative thinking, their acknowledgements and the teacher’s duty is to lead them with love and wisdom through all the school years. The primary teacher is the first person who helps the pupils to be creative, to encourage ans motivate them. The teacher has to eliminate the most important factors that may restrain creativity: shyness, fear of mistakes, discouragement and lack of tenacity. The Romanian class may be considered a “touchstone” in order to stimulate pupils’ creativity. Each pupil has to take part in an active way to his own training, but the school has also got an important part in leading him in order to discover his abilities. What other means can be more attractive than games? When playing, the child thinks he is free, relaxed, open-minded, but he has to follow some rules or tasks for ending the game properly. The best results were achieved when the lesson was organized as a game and the results were satisfactory because all the objectives have been achieved.

Conclusion

Originality represents the subject’s attitude towards new meanings or situations. The teachers have to be creative enough to help children develop their originality, using different exercises. It is a known reality that, children are very creative, they have a vivid imagination, they learn by exploring, by risking, by testing and by trying. The moment they go to school, their thinking changes its direction and becomes converging. This type of thinking moves towards a unique way of solving some problems. Some converging answers may sometimes create uncertainty for the pupils, or may transmit the message that the result of some problems can be found. The converging thinking has as possible effects the decline of curiosity and creative researches.

Teachers have to help children develop their creative thinking by awakening their curiosity, encouraging them to become curious and to ask “why?” School and teachers don’t have to restrict pupils’ imagination, but to support them to discover their own creative power. The more we know the pupils and their development abilities, the more we realize that teachers and trainers have a major role in their forming as organized and creative pupils with astonishing personalities. Pupils cannot be happy without physical satisfactions or without the feeling of success. They need to succeed in everything they do in order to overcome some critical and difficult situations or for avoiding the negative attitude towards studying or reaching the top. When the pupils succeed, the teachers succeed too, because they have to possess the skills for leading the pupils toward learning.

References

1. Cucoş, C., (1998). Psihopedagogie [Psychopedagogy], Iaşi: Polirom.
2. Ionescu, M.., Radu. I, (2001). Didactica modernă, [Modern Didactics], Cluj Napoca, Dacia.
3. Moraru, I., (1997). Psihologia creativităţii, [The Psychology of Creativity], Bucureşti: Victor.
4. Nicola, Gr., (1981). Stimularea creativităţii elevilor în procesul de învăţământ, [The Stimulation of Pupils’ Creativity in the Educational System], Bucureşti: E.D.P.
5. Stoica, A. (1983). Creativitatea elevilor, [Pupils’ Creativity], Bucureşti: E.D.P.
6. Vlăsceanu, L. (1989). Ipoteza în cercetare [The Hypothesis in the Field of the Research], în Revista de pedagogie, Bucuresti: Tiporgafia Universitatii.