Day 4- Drama Time!

Our last day in the Brock drama classroom, can not believe how fast the time went by. Today I developed an appreciation for the creative process. I feel that often we do not give students or children in general enough time to be creative on their own. We sit them in front of I pads, drill them with math questions and then rush them off to soccer practice. Because we do not give creativity the time we often forget the importance of it. Imagining and generating ideas are things children need to on a daily basis, and i am sad because not all of them do. I also feel that you can apply the creative process cross curricular. Not just in drama or art but in social studies or science. In my first teaching block I had my grade 5 social studies class create an action plan to reduce poverty in Niagara. So many of them struggled to come up with the concepts themselves, some students rushed to finish the assignment where others were actually stressed out because they could not come up with something on their own. This scared me a lot, I thought the students would have been excited to use their imaginations and create something totally new! After a lot of encouragement i could see the light bulbs go on and most of the kids were able to go through the creative process on their own, and they loved it! 

Guided Visualization is a great strategy to use in the classroom. Giving students something to visual gives them structure but allows for creativity too. My associate teacher did this in our grade 5 classroom except in language. We would read a book to the students but give them no idea of what the pictures look like, from there they had to draw a picture of what they saw. It was so fascinating see how unique every student's drawing was. You could use this guided visualization strategy in so many different subject areas and different approaches. Student could act out what they are visualizing ,draw it or come up with a caption for it. This strikes creativity and shows children they are creative and they come up ideas on their own and their unique ideas are okay!

 One last thought about creativity is that i think it goes hand in hand with identity. Critical position explains how so many different things contribute to an individuals identity. Creativity in any way could be considered a flexible trait in an individual.