The Creative Child Initiative

Hello and Welcome to The Creative Child!

About

The Creative Child Initiative is an extension of The Developed Child for one reason. There is a strong connection between artistic activities and healthy child development. While researching and reading about child development, you will notice a strong emphasis on promoting emotional expression, creativity, cognition, and self-esteem, all of which are extremely important skills to acquire in childhood and have been found to be strengthened by art. Art allows children and adults the freedom of emotional expression.

From my personal experience, art was a refuge for me. Besides my passion for studying psychology and researching child development, I am also an artist! I love drawing. In fact, I started drawing at 8-years-old. I was enrolled at an art academy where I was taught how to draw with chalk. Even when I was too young to understand the implications art had in my life, it made a difference in the way I handled situations. It brought me peace amidst the challenging times and it still does today. After experiencing the joy found in art and understanding its significance in childhood, I started teaching children how to draw and express their emotions creatively. Art can reduce stress and negative emotions, increase concentration, stimulate the imagination, and provide a sense of self-accomplishment. You do not have to be an artist in order to be engaged in art. Your child does not have to draw perfectly to benefit from art. Simple activities such as scrabbling and coloring are still beneficial to a child’s development. Your child does not have to create beautiful artwork for the experience to be considered beneficial for them. When art is involved, it is important to understand it as a process of creating, discovering, learning, and experimenting. Their artwork does not have to be perfect. It is a simple expression of creativity, which is unique to every child. With time, your child’s skills will improve and their creativity and self-expression will become more defined.

From research found in child development, we know how important art can be in childhood. There is great joy in improving a child’s life and giving them the best possible childhood, one that includes creativity and freedom of expression. I experienced this joy firsthand from teaching art classes. For all these reasons, I decided to launch The Creative Child. This initiative aims to raise awareness on the importance of promoting artistic activities in childhood. Our goal is to also provide children with art classes and parents with easy, creative ideas to implement at home.

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My Story

The Artistic Past

Services

The Virtual Museum

Importance

Children express themselves, their thoughts, and feelings through art. Their drawings are often an expression of their true feelings. Getting creative helps children to process their feelings and communicate them indirectly. We understand children’s feelings through the colors they choose, the patterns they draw, and the stories they create in their artwork.

Increasing artistic activities at home and at school improves children’s creativity and inventiveness. Instead of being receivers of information and strictly following instructions, children become makers and storytellers with their own growing identity. Through experimenting with different colors, mixing patterns, and discovering how to draw objects, creativity increases. Art creates space for a child to flourish in their true sense, be themselves, and freely express their thoughts and feelings. When we encourage children to freely express themselves, innovation rises, which is an important skill to have as adults.

While we might want children to focus more on their core subjects at schools, parents and teachers must not forget the importance of arts and their benefits in a child’s development. Nevertheless, art is also connected to improved academic performance. Children who engage in arts are more likely to succeed academically and win awards at school. So while you might want your child to study more, you should also encourage artistic activities.

Benefits

Why Creating Art with Your Child is Important

If you have ever watched children engaged in an art activity, then you have noticed their high concentration and attention whilst coloring or painting. This creative and explorative experience has various important implications in children’s development. Art strengthens a child’s self-expression and communication. Children who are involved in creating art on a regular basis have greater abilities in interacting with others and communicating their feelings accurately. Art is just as important to learn as sciences and languages are. It is essential for cultivating our creativity and innovation and progressing our development as humans.

Important Skills Acquired Through Art that Benefit a Child’s Development

While creating art seems like playing any other activity, it is actually not just that! When children are involved in art, they are also learning and exploring a variety of new skills that are beneficial for their development.

Language Skills: creating art encourages children to learn new words for colors, shapes, and actions.

Communication Skills: when children begin to draw or paint certain picture, they are actually expressing their thoughts non-verbally. Their artwork may represent a real experience that happened with them. For example, child who visited the park may paint a picture of the park. After experiencing a stressful event, a child might express his suppressed emotions through artwork. Therefore, art provides space for children to communicate emotions that are difficult to be expressed verbally.

Problem-Solving Skills: when children are involved in creating art, they begin to explore and test new ideas. For example, a child might mix colors together to create pink, but instead end up with a different color. He/she will start to think and assess how this happened, and come up with a solution. Art teaches children that for every problem, there are various solutions. Colored outside the lines? That’s alright! You can expand the line. Created a different color? That’s alright! You can add a third color and make something new. Instead of training children to simply follow instructions on what to do next, art allows children to understand why things did not work out and how to make them work. Learning art includes solving unexpected challenges and creating new solutions, all of which strengthens children’s problem-solving skills.

Social & Emotional Skills: art promotes positive mental health. It helps children to understand their emotions and creatively communicate it on paper. Art allows children to control and express their big feelings in a healthy manner. Playing artistic activities in groups also teaches children important social skills such as taking turns and complementing other’s drawings.

Fine Motor Skills: swapping the paintbrush in a certain way, scribbling with a crayon, cutting paper with scissors to make desired shapes, and drawing with chalk are all necessary for the development of fine motor skills in childhood. Creating art enhances children’s ability to deal with objects, improves their fine motor skills, and allows them to reach their developmental milestones.

Activities

Coming Soon

Register

Would you like to register your child in an art class?

Art classes include activities such painting, chalk drawing, and creating collages.

Kindly fill in the box below and we will get in contact with you as soon as possible.

Exhibition Views

Art

"The emotions are sometimes so strong that I work without knowing it. The strokes come like speech"

- Vincent van Gogh
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