Encouraging imagination in Kids

Kids are imaginative. You only have to hang around any human under the age of 12 to see how readily their minds turn to fantastical scenarios or characters that may or may not exist in our world.

Kid's lives today are full of structured activities. School can span the main hours of the day with extra-curricular activities often crammed in the morning and afternoon, not to mention commuting which can often be very time consuming.

While all these factors are significant in the education of a child, it is important that kids also get time to express their own creativity and imagination, outside of a structured environment. Because the benefits of this free time are hard to quantify, it can often be neglected and undervalued.

Why is imagination important?

"Knowledge", as Einstein says, "can get us from A to B. Imagination can take us anywhere."
The ability to think out of the box, out of strictly structured guidelines can develop creative thinkers. Given an atypical set of circumstances a creative thinker can come up with a solution that fits, whereas a child that is encouraged to only give answers to specific questions will invariably be stuck.

Imagination also lets kids role-play foreign situations and experiences that they have yet to experience for themselves but may have been exposed to. By putting themselves in that particular scenario they can understand more fully the dynamics involved in say; buying a loaf of bread, driving a car, sailing a ship or blasting to the moon.

Encouraging kids to have imaginative minds needn't mean letting them loose to do whatever they want, uncontrolled and unsupervised. Simply setting up a specific space with a variety of creative tools, where supervision is distant but there if needed, can set them on a path to creative problem-solving.

Inger loves to write and has been writing words on paper for quite some time. When the Internet came along she started writing online too. You can see her latest website which helps parents to chose the best puppets for kids at http://www.puppetsforkids.org