The Secret to Raising Creative Children? Let Them Explore 🎨

If we want to encourage creativity in young children, the obvious place to start might seem to be paint, crayons, glue and craft materials. But before children can use any of those things creatively, they need something much more fundamental: experiences to draw from.

A baby squeezing something soft in their hand, a toddler running their fingers through wet sand or a child discovering that paint behaves completely differently on bubble wrap than it does on paper may look like simple moments of play. But every one of these experiences gives children new information about the world.

And the more they have to explore, the more they have to think with.

Raising creative children starts with exploration

Babies and toddlers learn about the world through their whole bodies:

They touch, squeeze, shake, bang, drop, smear, splash and sniff things and occasionally try to taste them too.

Through all of this, they are collecting information. Something feels rough while something else is smooth. One material is cold and slippery, another is stretchy, squashy or sticky. Push something and it moves. Squeeze it and it changes shape. Bang two objects together and suddenly there is a sound.

Nobody needs to formally explain these discoveries to a baby. They learn them through experience.

This week, for example, our babies at Fun Box explored Crazy Soap and jelly. There wasn't a picture or model to take home at the end of the activity, nor did there need to be. The experience itself was the important part: touching, squeezing and spreading the materials, feeling the different textures and watching what happened when they moved them around.

Water, sand, mud, dough, fabrics, natural materials, paint, foam, ice, brushes, sponges and appropriately chosen everyday objects can all add something slightly different to a young child's understanding of the physical world.

Of course, anything offered to very young children needs to be suitable for their age and stage, safe and appropriately supervised. Within those boundaries, however, variety gives children more to discover.

This is an important part of raising creative children because imagination doesn't develop in an empty space. Children need things to see, hear, touch, move, investigate and experience before they can begin combining those experiences into ideas of their own.

The process is where so much of the learning happens

Young children's artwork is rarely really about producing a polished end result. Quite often, the interesting part is everything that happens along the way.

A toddler might spend ten minutes mixing red, yellow and blue paint until eventually everything has become brown. The brown itself isn't particularly important. What happened while getting there is:

They mixed colours and watched them change. They experimented with how much paint to add and how to move it around. They noticed cause and effect and perhaps repeated something to see whether the same thing would happen again. They made decisions and then changed those decisions when something unexpected happened.

That experimentation is an important part of creative thinking.

The Department for Education's early years guidance on imagination and creativity describes creativity as children's unique response to what they see, hear, feel and experience. It encourages practitioners to offer multi-sensory experiences, a wide range of materials and enough time and space for children to explore without always starting with a predetermined end result. And that last part matters.

Sometimes one of the best ways to encourage creativity is simply to change something familiar and see what children decide to do with it.

Change the surface and you change the experience

Paper is brilliant. But children don't have to paint on paper every time.

At Fun Box this week, we experimented with giving the children some very different surfaces and ways to paint. One of those was bubble wrap.

Suddenly, an activity the children already knew behaved differently. The surface was bumpy rather than smooth, brushes moved differently across it, paint gathered between the bubbles and hands could press against it to make prints.

We also let the children paint tyres.

Now, admittedly, we're not suggesting that every parent needs to source a collection of old tyres for the back garden in the name of early education. This is one of the advantages of nursery – we sometimes have access to slightly more unusual resources. But for the children, painting them created another completely different experience. A tyre is curved, covered in grooves and patterns and needs to be approached differently from a flat piece of paper. Children have to move around it, reach across it and work out how their brush and paint behave on a very different surface.

We also tried large-scale splat painting, giving children much more space to move.

Rather than using the smaller hand and wrist movements involved in painting at a table, children could involve much more of their bodies. Paint could be flicked, dripped, splatted, printed and splashed while they watched colours meet and patterns appear.

It doesn't have to be bubble wrap or tyres, of course. Corrugated cardboard, foil, textured wallpaper, boxes, leaves, sticks, sponges, rollers and all sorts of recycled materials can transform a familiar activity simply because they behave differently. Changing one element creates a new problem to investigate:

What can I do with this?

And that question sits right at the heart of creative thinking.

A child's creation is a snapshot of their development

This is perhaps one of the most fascinating things about children's creations.

A piece of artwork doesn't only show what a child decided to make that day. Look a little closer and it can reveal an extraordinary combination of everything they can currently do and understand. The marks they make are influenced by their physical development and coordination. Their ideas draw upon things they have previously seen and experienced. Their growing understanding of colour, shape, size, pattern and space begins appearing in their work. They use memory to recall things they know, language to communicate their ideas and imagination to take something familiar and change it. There is plenty of problem-solving involved too.

Things don't always behave as expected. A construction collapses, the glue refuses to hold, something won't fit where the child wanted it to go or two carefully selected paint colours produce a completely unexpected result. So the child adapts. They try something else, change their plan or find another way. That is creativity too.

In that sense, a child's creation is a snapshot of their development at that particular moment. It brings together what they can physically do, what they already know, what they remember, what they have experienced and what they are beginning to imagine. And as their experiences become richer, their creativity has more to draw upon.

We don't always need to show children what to make

There is absolutely a place in early childhood for adults to demonstrate techniques, introduce new skills and create things alongside children. Children need to learn how tools and materials can be used. They may need someone to show them how to hold something, join materials together or try a technique they haven't encountered before.

But teaching a skill is slightly different from deciding what the finished creation should look like. If we choose all the materials, show children exactly what to make and demonstrate precisely how the finished object should look, many of the creative decisions have already been made for them. Sometimes it is much more interesting to provide an unusual surface, paint, a selection of tools, plenty of time and a little encouragement – and then see what happens. One child may carefully print a repeated pattern. Another might become completely fascinated by mixing colours. Someone else may abandon the brush and discover that their hands are much more interesting painting tools.

And every now and then, a child will find a use for a material that none of the adults had considered. Quite often, that is exactly the creativity we were hoping for.

Talk about the experience – without turning it into a quiz

Adults still have an incredibly important role while children explore. This is particularly true for babies and toddlers, who are having all these experiences while also building the language they need to understand and describe them. A sensitive adult can help connect the experience with words:

“You're squeezing the jelly.”

“That feels cold and slippery.”

“The soap is really soft.”

“You pushed it and it squashed between your fingers.”

This sort of gentle running commentary helps children hear words connected to what they are doing and feeling at that very moment. Over time, words such as smooth, rough, sticky, wet, squeeze, press, drip, soft and hard begin to carry meaning because children have experienced them rather than simply heard them.

Adults sometimes feel that supporting learning means constantly asking questions: What colour is that? What are you making? What happens next? What does that feel like? One or two genuine questions can open up thinking, particularly with older children, but we don't need hundreds of them. Sometimes simply noticing what the child is doing and putting useful language alongside the experience is far more valuable.

With babies and toddlers especially, that responsive commentary can help them make sense of what they are experiencing while steadily building their vocabulary. With older children, we can leave a little more room for conversation and wondering together: What do you think would happen if...? or I wonder why that happened?

The aim is to give children language for their experiences while still leaving the exploration in their hands.

Creativity needs time – and repetition

Children also need enough time to become absorbed in what they are doing.

The EYFS statutory framework emphasises both the quality and variety of children's experiences and their frequency, repetition and depth. In other words, children don't need adults to invent a completely new activity every day. Returning to something familiar can be just as valuable.

A child may use the same paint, dough, blocks or construction materials many times and discover something different because they are different. Their hands have become more capable. Their understanding has developed. They remember what happened last time. Perhaps they can now do something they couldn't do a few weeks ago, or they arrive with a completely different idea. Repetition isn't the opposite of creativity. Very often, it gives creativity somewhere to grow.

You don't need an enormous craft cupboard

Thankfully, none of this means you need to turn your dining room into an art studio – or start collecting tyres. Some of the most interesting creative materials are already around us.

A cardboard delivery box can become a painting surface. Water and a large paintbrush can create temporary pictures on a fence or patio. Leaves can become printing tools. A kitchen sponge produces a completely different mark from a paintbrush. An old cardboard tube can roll paint, stamp circles or become something entirely unrelated because your child has decided it is actually a telescope. It isn't about owning every possible art material or constantly planning elaborate activities.

It is about giving children opportunities to investigate how things feel and behave, experiment with what they can do, encounter the unexpected and discover that there isn't always one correct answer. Because long before children learn to draw recognisable people, paint elaborate pictures or build complicated models, they are learning something much bigger.

They are learning that they can have an idea. They can explore it, change it, make a mistake, solve a problem and try again. And eventually, they can take everything they have seen, touched, heard, felt and learned and use it to create something that wasn't there before. Sometimes that might be a carefully considered creation. Sometimes it might be a sheet covered in joyful splats of paint. And sometimes it might be a painted tyre.

What matters is everything they discovered along the way. 💜