Can you teach creativity?

[Helenagrace]

DD has always struggled with writing tasks. She scraped a 2c at KS1 despite being a good 3a for reading & maths.

She's now in Y5 and she hit level 4 for English and maths last year but is still barely level 3 for writing. Her physical writing problems are dyslexia, dysgraphia and dyspraxia but there seems to be a problem with being able to write creatively. She just doesn't seem able to imagine an event or place or object.

DS is starting to exhibit similar problems. He is in Y1 and already at level 3 for maths and reading. His teacher said today that his writing is already an issue. We're working on his physical writing at home but again the content is a problem.

Can I "teach" creativity? If so how?
Do I just accept this as a weakness and do nothing? Will it matter in the future?

FWIW neither me not DH are very creative. His degree is in maths. My degree is in health policy and management and We're both very analytical and factual people. Is this just personality and genetics?

Unusual to get a dx of dyslexia when you're a 3a for reading in Y2.

Being unable to imagine stuff isn't a symptom of dyslexia. It is a symptom of other things going on.

Anyway, are you saying that it's not a writing problem? That if you asked her to tell you the task, rather than write it, she still couldn't do it?

Just feeding and typing on phone but will be back later with a couple of suggestions of things you could do to help them expand their thinking.

Most good writers are prolific readers and they use that 'back story' of built up narratives to construct their own. They refer to archetypical narrative easily.

In contrast, poor writers have a very narrow 'bank' of narrative to rely on to construct their own stories. Dyslexia is often associated with poor memory which may limit recall of archetypical narrative.

When I work with children like this it always involves orally retelling stories to help construct this 'bank'. I begin with the traditional tales.

Pie Corbett has published excellent resources to support this type of teaching and learning. He is also worth going to see in seminar, following on Twitter and I would recommend his blog.

I hope some of this is helpful.

I think that the best way of building a child's imagination is to read a range stories to them. The aim of creative writing to use interest vocabulary.

This game can help with imagination. It consists of beautiful cards and your children have to describe what is happening.

www.amazon.co.uk/Storyworld-John-Caitlin-Matthews/dp/1840117389

Or maybe drama or role play.

Lack of creativity is not dyslexia. The inablity to imagine stuff is a cognitive issue rather than a specific learning difficulty like dyslexia or dyspraxia. What are your children's social skills like?

Look up sir ken robson/robinson on u tube, he says it all.

You could have described my DS. He's in year 2, already a 3a for maths and reading but his creative writing is completely lacking. He's very narrow minded and stubborn though and doesn't see the point of describing, for example, a tree. In his mind, everyone knows what a tree looks like so why does he need to tell the reader that it's trunk was rough, it's branches long and it's leaves as green as emeralds etc

I don't think I'll ever change him because DH is the same.

Creativity is NOT about the arts but is inherent to human nature (Focault). Is she struggling at the ideas stage or at 'getting it on paper'? Humans were creative before written words were created. It def does not help that you say you are not creative. The def of creativity is about the ability to think logically, make connections, see depth, explore different points of view, think inside, outside and round the box, problem solve and problem seek. Get her to read more, talk more (def see PIe Corbett stuff) but identify what the actual issue is. its hard for kids to imagine and get the paragraphs, full stops etc right at the same time (which is what is often expected!). Start with something she likes/enjoys then open up the descriptors. Get her to draw her ideas down giving lots of colour, make collages to explore textures, go to industrial museums to explore sounds, go camping and discuss the environment, ask tons and tons of questions, set her problems to solve within daily life, even simple ones will help her thinking..it's all out there. Perhaps her brain works differently to a perceived norm within creativity but as a teacher of creativity I haven't yet met a kid who isn't creative. The challenge is to draw it out rather than expect them all to be the next great author.

I'd practice being creative in ways other than standard writing as their physical problems with writing probably holds back their imagination.

Do your children draw? Play role play games? Dress up? Charades? Hangman?
What sort of toys do they have? Mine play with dolls, Lego people, action figures, cars,robots,playdoh... and make up stories using them.
Would your children like making a dance routine? Listening to music?

Sorry, I'm back - 24 hours later than planned but that's what a gassy, snuffly, over-tired baby will do to you.

Pie Corbett is excellent as mentioned above. He's written a couple of Jumpstart books, Jumpstart Storymaking and Jumpstart Literacy both of which give loads of fantastic ideas of games you can play to develop imaginative thinking. I used to do a lot of these as lesson openers in Y4 and they loved them. A favourite one was to give a funny sentence opener and let them finish the sentence, the more imaginative and funnier the better: Superman's disastrous day began when... he realised his Mum had shrunk his underpants in the drier etc.

When getting the children to develop characters and be able to describe them I got them all to model their character in playdough first and then in pairs ask each other questions about their characters - what's his favourite food?... where would he hide if he got really scared?... what makes him happy? They loved this because they got to play with playdough (which is a rarity in Y4!) but it also got them to realise that a character is more than just their actions in a story and they began to think about how their character would think and behave and why. It's another fun one to do.

You could try hotseating - read a favourite story and then to start with you could pretend to be the main character and let DD and DS ask you any questions they can think of and you have to answer in character. Once they get the hang of it then they can be the character while you ask the questions.

Another teacher at school has had a lot of success in Y5 playing a game with adverbs. One child leaves the room while the rest decide on an adverb e.g. angrily. When the child comes back he can ask any child to perform any action in that manner. So he might choose to have one of them sing and they must sing angrily. The child then has to try and guess the word and can ask for another example. It's not necessarily developing imagination but it gets the children to think about adverbs and they really do then begin to use them in their writing which can really help them to portray a character's emotions or intentions.

I hope some of these help and good luck! The more you talk about stories and characters the better :)

perhaps you could get a few books out of the librrary on a similar theme... and look for descriptive languge used by the authors, collect it together and write some sentences using the language.

perrhaps find a scene from a picture book and descibe it using as many words as they can think of. try putting some of them together into a sentence to introduce a story.

I would be very about the 3a/2c assessments. To be a 3a reader, a child has got to meet criteria for explanation, inference, deduction, etc, about a text, and will therefore have a good sense of sentence structure, text organisation and a wide vocabulary. I cannot understand how a child reading at such a high level will only be able to manage 2c in writing.

Our children like story cubes, which are 9 dice with different pictures, which you throw and then you have to make up a story based on the pictures. Maybe you could organise a family writing festival one weekend, all go to a museum and then ALL write about it, and judge each other's work, junior + senior prizes for most number of adjectives, most interesting phrase etc. If they don't perceive that you value/use creativity then they might not either. It might be interesting for you and your dh to get more creative alongside them.

OP, I'm a writer by trade. And dyslexic too .

Can creative writing be taught? Well the jury's out on that one. Certainly there is a whole industry predicated on the assumption that you can.

I agree with others, in that before you worry about the writing of stories, you need to concentrate on the making of them. Some poeple (and there is no getting away from this), have an innate sense of story. They're the ones who can make waiting for a bus sound like the most hilarious adventure ever.

But everyone is IMVHO connected to story. Humans have always used it to understand our world. It's in our DNA if you like.

How to enourage it? Read lots and lots of stories. Tell lots of stories. Discuss what makes the best ones so great. Ask what you think the character is going to do next (very different question to what you would do next, or what people generally would do next) as this requires empathy.

However, much of this won't necessarily get you good marks in an English test, which is based on a whole other set of values...

Helenagrace can I just say that IMHO maths requires a high level of creativity just not the same creativity as an artist or musician or writer.

I'm also going to disagree that children who read a lot are necessarily more creative writers than children who don't read. Prolific readers have more interesting vocabulary and a better understanding of how to write for an audience but often don't have their own ideas so regurgitate what they have read... and I personally wouldn't call that being creative.

Encourage imagination and story telling and dare I say it lying (tall tales)... We tell made up news ... this weekend I'm going for tea with the queen. She's sending the royal carriage to collect me around 2pm and we are meeting an alien who landed in a field and said "Take me to your leader" ....

Role play, encourage them to do role play, as much as possible.
Play in general, really.
Read up about the Tools of the Mind curriculum, which is immensely play-based.
Also, don't read to them. Get them to read the stories to you. Better yet, get wordless books & get them to tell you the story it features using their own words. Encourage them to embellish. Or substitute the word "toilet" for every noun.

I am doing the last with DS3 to encourage his articulacy (?is that a word? trying to make him more articulate). He has speech delay, but I know there are other benefits.

My DS is now yr 4 and is starting to produce highly creative writing, in school and for homework. Up until this year in school, his wrote as little as possible as he disliked it, though his reading and spelling have always been good. He doesn't read widely, he does the minimum he can get away with, I make him read 4 evenings a week and of course, he has to at school. I also read to him before bed, but his choices are generally restricted to his atlas and history books - he prefers facts. He's highly articulate and can argue for hours....sigh.

Nonetheless he is starting to write interesting complex stories which has amazed me, with good and varied sentence structure. I don't know where it comes from, all the work we've done with him has really been factual as its his strong preference. We've never made up stories, done role play, done any drawing or craft unless forced to by school, etc, he hates that type of thing!

But he's able to make up interesting complex stories now so that's what matters

I'm delighted as I've always worried a little that his lack of interest in writing / creative things generally would hold him back and have always been trying to read him interesting story books, etc but to no avail, he'd much prefer to pore over his world map, we've never made it to the end of a Roald Dhal for example, actually we've never made it beyond the first couple of chapters.

I'm not a fan myself (I know ...sacrilege!)

Do your dc read fiction?
Do they watch a lot of telly/films?
Do they play computer games/wii/ds/etc?
How do they entertain themselves?

Do they do imaginative play?

Thinking of things that might stimulate (or inhibit) creativity.

My school had a grant (can?t remember where from, it was ages ago, sorry) for adding creativity to the curriculum.

Try asking these two sites CCET and CCE.

Some people like

Some great ideas here. Thank you very much.

DD does read and does imaginative play. I'll look at all these suggestions and see how we can make use of them.

Thank you again.

On the weekend, after dd1 had spent 2.5 seconds scribbling an answer for her homework, and dh and I broke the parent code and told her we thought she could do better, I helped her come up with a 'story formula'. I suggested that she thinks of three themes (in this case they had to make up places to visit), put one on each post-it, and then three things that she might see there along with some adjectives to describe each thing, again one per post-it note. As we had two colour post-it notes unused, she decided to also use one to describe the weather and one to describe her emotions. She did this for each place, ending up with 6 post-it notes per place. She then used them as the basis for her story.

Would using a formula like that, or making her own formula up, appeal to your dd? after all it works for daisy meadows and her fairies She could analyse they story lines of her favourite books and try to develop something along those lines.

My DD is in Y5. She is a very good reader and reads every day, and reads a variety of books. She also enjoys being read to and listen to audio books.

However she finds writing harder. She has some dyselxic tendancies (although we don't think she is dyslexic as such) - she has been assessed and it is very much borderline, but some areas are definitely an issue - and she has support for that.

Her writing assessments are generally lower than reading as she is restricted due to her difficulties, something we are working on now. She will restrict the words she uses to ones she is comfortable writing, even though verbally she would use more complex sentence structures and more descriptive words, etc. Her handwriting is also affected which can also have a bearing on writing grades.

One of the reasons DD was originally assessed at school was due to the discrepancy ebtween her reading and writing grades at the end of Y2.

Creativity is something that you can teach skills for though - have prompts or a bank of ideas to draw on. Not all children can pull them from reading. With some children I work with I have dice with character and setting ideas on - to give them a bit of a boost with their initial ideas.