Beautiful Art Centers to Encourage Creativity

A beautifully designed art space encourages creativity and inventiveness in thinking.

Beutifully designed art center to encourage creativity journeyintoearlychildhood.com

Children draw, paint, design, build and sculpt using their creativity.
Beautifully designed art center to encourage creativity journeyintoearlychildhood.com

They use thinking skills to plan, organize, make decisions, and represent their ideas as they express their ideas through a variety of media.
Children grow cognitive, problem-solving, and decision-making skills while experimenting with color, line, shape, size, proportions, and dimensions.

Natural Elements in Play

How do you add natural elements in the classroom? Share your ideas and pictures:

What are your additional thoughts about why it is critical that we add natural elements into the classroom?

“Not only do natural materials create a more visually appealing space, but they serve the purpose of fostering a connection to the natural world, which is especially important in more urban schools where exposure to nature is often quite limited. So not only do you want to switch out your plastics, but also offer actual items from nature as play materials, like pine cones, leaves, dried flower, tree slices, etc. for creative play and exploration. The more time children spend around these materials, the more comfortable they are with them and come to prefer them over the unsustainable, non-environmentally-friendly plastics.

Basic values are being built and shaped here, however subtle they might be. We need our next generation of students to have a deeper connection to and appreciation for the natural world so that they will help preserve it rather than continue to destroy it the way past and present generations (often unintentionally) have.”
-http://searchingforsparks.blogspot.com/2013/01/natural-elements-in-classroom.html

Loose Parts

UPDATED POST- includes a link to a letter to send home to families requesting loose parts

Loose ends engage children in thinking critically, creatively and holistically. They encourage students to make connections and their learning is strengthened through the hands-on exploration.
Students count, observe, predict, test ideas, draw conclusions, examine patterns, shapes, and sizes, compare and contrast, ask questions, summarize, and represent findings while playing with loose parts.
Loose parts play taps into students natural curiosity. It also provides a strong foundation for the thinking skills required for strong STEM learning.
Below is a letter that can be revised to meet your needs to send to parents requesting a variety of loose parts. What loose parts would you add to the list?