Microtone Music Notes

The July 10th issue of Newsweek affirms what we Kindermusik fans already knew - pretend play fosters life-long creativity. By encouraging creative behavior often throughout childhood and adulthood, neurological patterns change in the brain to make problem-solving faster and better.

Follow up:

We watch them play, we watch them dance, we watch them sing. Our amazing, magical children, who have an in-built program to grow and learn which we as parents are responsible for nurturing, directing, and celebrating. Play, we recall, is the child's work. This work is what ultimately leads to the ability to reason, to high-level abstraction, and all the future blessings we want for them.

How can we foster this growth? It's not really that hard. The opportunities are around us all the time, every day. We -- parents and educators -- are improving children’s problem-solving abilities and creativity every time we do an instrument exploration (What is another way you can play the sticks?), a role play with movement (How else can you move like a monkey?), and  introduce new props (What else could this hoop be?).  Participation in Kindermusik class fosters the development of creativity and problem solving!

Of course it is up to us -- again, parents and educators -- to keep those creative juices flowing. How? One of many, many simple strategies (which we use here at home where we are homeschooling our little Athena) is to point out a "problem" in the immediate environment -- "wow, that's a lot of crayons on the floor. What shall we do with them?" -- and help our daughter come up with a solution rather than simply telling her to clean them up. On the surface it appears to be the same: the idea is to get the crayons off the floor, right? But in our case, the crayon box is missing and there are no baskets available. So what does our daughter end up doing? She takes a number of ziploc bags from the kitchen, sorts the crayons by color, labels the bags with tape (and asks Mama to write the names of the colors on the labels), and there you go! From chaos to crafting.

The solution Athena found to the crayon crisis followed the path outlined in the Newsweek article perfectly. And it is this same sort of rapid, partially unconscious information processing and re-processing that is fostered by participation in creativity-focused programs. The goal is bi-lateral brainwork: both hemispheres operating in concert, each doing what it does best, the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.

Creativity is a learned art. The higher abstractions that spring from creative thought come when developmentally appropriate, provided the necessary skills have been practiced for long enough. It isn't necessary to wait for the Muse to descend; with practice, She can be summoned almost at will. As a working composer, I can attest to this fact. You can't wait for inspiration when you're on deadline, but you can "create" inspiration if needed. You just need to learn how.

And the earlier you start to learn these skills, the better.

Check out the article here:

The Creativity Crisis, by Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman; Newsweek 7/10/2010
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html