I love the words that poet Wallace Stevens wrote about the imagination: “The imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.”
To me, imagining possibilities is at the heart of children’s pretend play. That’s the beauty and significance of unstructured, self-invented play – play that leads to imaginative and creative thinking.
Let me describe a chance happening that describes beautifully how I see creative thinking. Michael (barely 3) and I had just gone outside to ‘look at things’. Almost immediately, two brightly-hued, glossy leaves fell in front of us and Michael pounced on them. Swiftly rearranging them to form a ‘V’ in his hand, he turned to look at me triumphantly and said: ‘Flower!’
He had taken two things and created a third – something original, something of value. The very essence of creativity! An ordinary moment had… Read the rest