ABSTRACT
According to international experts in business, academia and industry, creativity is one of the most important characteristics of a thriving organisation and a competent, motivated community of workers. Yet this is still the one aspect of early education that seems to be the hardest to facilitate, teach, model, observe and measure successfully. The reasons could be to do with a misunderstanding of what creativity means, what it looks like in practice, how to help spot, progress and measure its qualities, and how to harness it at different developmental stages in all young children. Ultimately, educators who lack confidence in their own artistic ability, and its associations with fashioning a product rather than enjoying a process, are amongst those who feel the most challenged in bringing out children’s innate creative capabilities. This chapter explores what creativity means and how it is relevant for the world of early education where children’s minds are wide open to possibility. The author identifies in what ways creativity helps each area of a child’s learning and development, how creativity can be released through different art forms, how it can be nurtured and taught successfully by both educators and parents and, ultimately, how we can discover and release our own, inner creativity.
