Russ Schoen

Last Wednesday, I had the opportunity to teach creative thinking as part of the principal for a day program in Chicago. This program invites people from the community to come in and work with students and I was assigned to a second grade and a first grade class. In grad school, I had heard of the "fourth grade slump" ; the notion that creative thinking scores drop quite a bit among children between the 4th and 5th grades. But I did wonder what does creativity look like in younger kids. Does it suddenly drop in the 4th grade or does it gradually drop? and why? After introducing myself, and what I did, I asked the students, "who here considers themselves creative?" How many hands do you think went up? or rather SHOT UP?!!!! Every single student raised his/her hand high… "Who here has new ideas?" I asked. Again, every hand went up. When I asked them to invent a story, their energy was amazing with students busily drawing, coloring and naming made up animals. 

One of my colleagues who worked with an older group of 6th and 7th graders reported this interaction… when he asked what the students enjoyed about the creative exercise he led that day, the response was, "It was fun to be able to be creative and not get in trouble for it." 

Which raises this question, how can you best support creative development of youth as they get older? What do you think?

On another note, the director of the school let me know of a pretty cool site that links donors to student needs. Check it out at www.donorschoose.org.

Till next time… Happy Monday!