null

How to Nurture and Encourage your Child's Creative Thinking Skills

Posted by Brian Semling on Aug 3rd 2018

Kids have spent all summer playing, and while they haven’t physically been in a classroom, the way they learn through play, especially creative play is immeasurable. Creative thinking is crucial for children to build their social, problem-solving, and critical thinking skills, and it happens majorly when they engage their imagination and participate in creative play.

Creative play is not only declared the right of every child, but it presents a large opportunity for learning.  Through creative play, children experiment and build with different materials, communicate verbally and non-verbally, plan, act, interact, react, and take on different roles. Strictly Briks understands how important creativity is for a child’s educational and social development, and our toys encourage creative thinking for children of all ages. Here’s how to nurture your child’s imagination and encourage their creative thinking.

Encourage open-ended play

By definition, open-ended play allows children to express their creativity freely. Open-ended toys don’t provide instruction. They don’t inform the child how they’re supposed to use the toy. The choice of what they imagine, build, or create is entirely up to them. This type of play is especially valuable to a child’s decision-making skills as they become the creative leader during playtime.

Open-ended play materials

Strictly Briks toys are the epitome of open-ended play materials. Our building bricks and baseplate sets have endless building possibilities. With our Trap and Gap Baseplates children can create multi-level buildings with trap doors and ramps. They can build an escape route for the bad guys or build a parking garage for their shopping mall. Children aren’t just building with Strictly Briks, they’re using their imagination to create a story. This is the benefit of open-ended play and how it enables your child to utilize their imagination and fully engage their creative-thinking skills.

Encourage your child to be an inventor during playtime

Challenge your child to think outside of the box and innovate. Encourage them to make something out of nothing. Whether it’s taking ordinary household objects like clothespins and rubber bands and creating a bridge for their toy cars, or using their building bricks to create a spaceship that flies to the moon, challenging them to build and create freely without guidance boosts their imagination and engages their creative thinking.

Allow children to make mistakes

Allowing your child to make mistakes during play time is essential to their growth and learning. Strictly Briks toys allow your children to build things up and take them apart. When they make a mistake in their building creation they learn and rebuild. Every mistake is an opportunity for your child’s creativity to flourish.

As the summer months conclude, and your children head back to the classroom, remember the importance of your child’s creativity. Engage your children in open-ended play and encourage their inventiveness to improve their creative thinking skills with Strictly Briks toys.