Students Choice Always A Winner

To develop creativity in the classroom you must first embrace creativity as part of learning.

For students to truly grow and progress, there has to be a point when intrinsic motivation comes into balance with extrinsic motivation. In the early stages of learning an art form, students engage with the activity because it's fun (intrinsic motivation). However, this motivation will allow them to progress only so far, and then their development begins to slow or even stop. At this point, lean on extrinsic motivation to continue your students growth. s

So after my last disastrous attempt at doing some fun art I thought it would throw it back at the students and see what they wanted to do. I thought this would motivate them into tackling the project with pride, and enthusiasm. It worked. The girls created an absolute fairyland and the boys created a Transformers wall.

Rainbow tree with mushroom people. Fairies who lived in the tree and unicorns who watched over them all keeping them safe from the evil with who lived in a forest of feathers.

Giant flower garden where the bumblebees and birds and snails and caterpillars lived with flower fairies.

A bombed out city where a group of Transformers live to fight crime and save the Universe from evil Megatron

 Stone castle where the Transformers live to hide from the bad aliens who are coming to invade Earth.

Giving the students ownership of what they wanted to create was awesome. There was so much positivity in the room. Students were talking about what else they could add to the murals. It was these discussions that I had been waiting to hear. The boys decided they need bugs like cockroaches to invade their city to make it creepier.

The girls decided they needed an evil witch who lived in a forest of feathers  and they wanted to make a cage to put a little girl in because the witch ate little girls. Their imaginations were running with all sorts of cool visions and I let them have free rein.

 Even though they did colour in the Transformers and fairies and not make them on their own, there was plenty of other creative designs the students came up with on their own. It was great seeing all the boys work together to create a wall they were so proud of. One can make an argument that communication may be the single most important aspect of existence. Our world is built through communication. Students learn a multitude of communication skills by working collaboratively with others.

Once they had finished the mural they got to write a narrative with their mural been the setting of their story. We got some amazing writing full of descriptive language and stories that were exciting to read.

As long as I teach I will place a huge role in the importance of art in my classroom. However the Arts cannot be learned through occasional or random exposure any more than math or science can.  So I can only do what I can in the given small amount of time I have to teach art. I will give them gifted vocabulary and I will continue to talk to them to try an generate discussions and hopefully over time they will get better at verbalising their thoughts and by the time they move to Year 4 they will be confident to share their ideas.