Encouraging Creativity in Children

When I attended a kindergarden open day at the end of last year, the kids were given activities to do. As I've mentioned the kids were quite young and some of them couldn't color very well yet. I saw one mum finishing off her kid's activity. She ended up coloring his artwork for him.

I smile because she looks a lot like me. Quite often, I would finish off my kids' work for them because I think they are not doing it the way it should be done or I think it looks ugly. I should really learn to relax and let them do it in their own way (even if it looks ugly). They will take more pride in their own work that way.

Apart from getting impatient and finishing off their work from them, I should also learn to refrain from hovering over them and giving them too many suggestions. That way they will become more creative and as I learned, sometimes they have reasons of their own for doing things in a certain way.

My girl had chosen to color the piglet character (from Winnie and Pooh), The piglet was all pink but she had colored in orange for its clothes. The teacher asked why she didn't color the clothes pink but she didn't say anything. When I asked her why later, she said she noticed that the clothes were pink but there was no pink available, so she tried the peach but it was too light and the color didn't come out because the teacher had asked them to press really hard to make sure the color appeared and that is why she took orange. Haha. So she had her reasons and who said pigs or piglet has to be orange?