Creativity and Art are a vital area of child development and communication.

As general guide, children at age 5 to 6 is an ideal age to develop creativity and artistry as they are not conditioned in logical thinking at this stage and their fine motors skills are developing fast. Of course, it is never too late for any child to be exposed or trained at any age. Even adult can 're-learn' this artistic and creative ability. 

Well, it is not the telling them to be creative and do something different will make any difference. To nurture the area of creativity and artistry, the process is very important as something you will meet with different end. Creativity usuaully hidden and unintentional. A child with proper motors skills and thinking skills, can bring out their inner creativity visually so that they can be shared with parents or others as they understand, apprehen and appreciate.

I have extracted perspectives in these areas to share with you. Their findings and research matched with our research at UniqArts as well and this has motivated us to continue in research and explore different teaching tools or methods to develop and nurture artistry and creativity for the children. 

According to Dr. Maria Montessori:. artistic activity is a form of reasoning, in which perceiving and thinking are indivisible intertwined. A person who paints, writes, composes, dances… thinks with his sense…Genuine art work requires organization which involves many and perhaps all of the cognitive operations known from theoretical thinking..

According to Elliot Eisner(Lee Jacks Professor of Education, Stanford University), there are 10 key lessons that arts teach.

• The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.
• The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.
• The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.
• The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.
• The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor number exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.
• The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects.
• The arts traffic in subtleties.The arts teach students to think through and within a material.
• All art forms employ some means through which images become real.
• The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.
• The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.
• The arts  position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.

Given the chance to excel, a child who does badly in school can be a world leader, success in running business and great inventors. Here are some good examples:

Einstein was four before he could speak and seven before he could read. Isaac Newton did poorly in grade school. Werner von Braun flunked ninth grade algebra. Winston Churchill failed the sixth grade. Thomas Edison's teachers thought he was too stupid to learn anything. Leo Tolstoy flunked out of college! Walt Disney was fired from his job on a newspaper because the editor thought he had no good ideas. F.W. Woolworth was thought not to have enough sense to wait on customers.

Try to let your child explore their artistic and creative talents. It will be a great breakaway from studies as well. It is usually the visual art that communicate ideas better than words. Indeed, art has been used as therapy and in therapy for mental health development, growth, and wellness. It is a modality that helps individual to find creative inner self and a hybrid between psychology and art. 

There are many benefits that art brings to a person. I hope this above information and experience is useful for your education planning of your child.

Best Regards,
Paul Lee
Founder
UniqArts and Technologies