The external environment and nature are a powerful stimulus, an inexhaustible source of exploration and discovery for our little one and excellent opportunities to stimulate creativity!
The historical period has led all of us to spend a lot of time indoors, but slowly we are rediscovering the world outside the walls of the house, especially our children.
Playing outdoors allows the child to assimilate, learning, always new aspects of the reality that surrounds him and to adapt according to the different environments in which he finds himself. Being able to put your hands in the earth, knead it, touch the different natural surfaces that surround us, observe the colors, the scents, the noises that follow each other in the seasons, are all stimuli that provoke a multitude of questions to be answered.
As recent scientific studies argue, and as Danilo Casertano, founder of the Natural Schools points out, a child who learns outdoors is a happier child, thanks to what is called the 'biophilic effect': the child, who is naturally attracted to nature, feels a sense of well-being, precisely because in contact with a living environment. Nature, therefore, is an excellent opportunity to learn and to stimulate creative intelligence.
But what is creativity?
Creativity is the ability to find original solutions, new ideas, to act in an unexpected way, which does not follow standardized procedures. It is the ability to look at the world around us from an ever-changing point of view. It has to do with the ability to see beyond, to invent and transform situations into opportunities, challenges and solutions.
Creativity is a process and as such it can be divided into phases: from preparation, in which the necessary information is collected to know all the facets of a problem; at incubation, in which the information acquired in the first phase is reprocessed; then the lighting, the moment in which the solution is found and finally the realization or implementation.
Children are naturally creative because they are constantly amazed: for them everything is new, a world to discover and explore. Growing up, however, we tend to get used to using creative intelligence. However, we can all train ourselves to think creatively, breaking out of the box and starting to reason by looking at even the small daily problems from another perspective. And we can also stimulate this ability for our children!
How can nature stimulate creativity?
Playing outdoors allows the child to assimilate, while learning, always new things of the reality that surrounds him and to adapt according to the different environments in which he finds himself. Here he has the opportunity to directly experience the world and the mechanisms that regulate it, discovering, day after day, its richness and complexity. Not only! Some researches and studies, then, reveal that accustoming the child to spend time in nature helps to increase his memory capacity, his attention, the spirit of observation and aptitude for problem solving.
Here are 3 easy activities that we can do together with our children while playing in nature taken from the Creativity activity book for the little ones of the QUID + series, published by Gribaudo:
Training creative intelligence in nature and in the open air will help our children to think in a new way in all areas of life, even and above all, when they find themselves facing small and big challenges!
Tag: Environment
