ABSTRACT
Creativity is sometimes believed to be a rather chaotic process where inspiration might strike from 'out of the blue' and can thus be quite haphazard and time-consuming. The predispositions depend as much upon conscious reasoning as they do upon the subconscious processing that gives rise to 'Eureka' moments of sudden insight. A basic 'cut ups' task would be to write the surnames of all the children in the class on separate scraps of paper and have the children arrange the names into alphabetical order. The 'Structure and function' activity can be used with literally thousands of objects and things from the natural world. Most children state with great authority that a story has a beginning, a middle and an end. Generally speaking this is true, though only the simplest narratives are so rigidly linear. Diamond ranking is a more flexible way of organising information than a straightforward linear sequence.
