Why are Lifestyle of Learning™ Kids So Creative?

Why are Lifestyle of Learning kids so creative? Why are they always making things?

When I was young and going to school, “creativity” was something that was saved for Friday afternoons. When all the academic assignments were done for the week, our teacher would give us an “artistic craft” assignment. She would show us a sample of what we were allowed to make, and then we were given the opportunity to cut, glue, staple and color. The teacher’s version was neat and tidy and it seemed like it was perfectly formed. Ours didn’t really turn out that way. The teacher would display our finished crafts around the classroom in a big long line, and we could see everyone’s version of the same thing. On school open house night, we pulled our parents over to see which one was ours. That was the extent of creativity when I was in school.

Why does creativity play such a small part in traditional schooling methods? In the real world, it is creativity that moves life forward. It is the creative and ingenious ideas of people to solve problems and meet needs that produce ever expanding and increasing improvement to life. Medical advancements, technological advancements, mechanical advancements and advancements in art and entertainment all stem from creativity. So why do you in your homeschool think of creativity as a side thing? Perhaps your child likes something creative like music or art or building things or making something. If you are doing school at home, you likely think that you will “let” your child do that “on the side” when all their really important school work is done. Creativity is “extra”, and it’s something to leave your children alone with because your work as teacher for the “important” stuff—academics—is done for the day.

I remember when I was doing school at home, my daughter would draw all over her school work. I called it doodling, and I found it annoying. Her papers didn’t look very nice, and I felt it represented a waste of time in which she was supposed to be doing her school work. Just my thoughts about it revealed that I felt the school work was more important than her desire to draw. I thought, if she wants to draw, she can do it when the important stuff is done. Then she can draw as much as she wants.

I was focused on getting school done each day with all my children, and I never considered helping her to improve her drawing, even though I myself am an artist good at drawing. What crazy thinking is that?! Artistic creativity was important enough in my own life to be my college degree, and yet when it came time to teach my own children, artistic creativity was an “extra” at best, and in my mind an actual annoyance toward getting school done.

If creativity is what actually moves life forward, then the education we provide our children ought to major in creativity, so that their lives and their future can move forward. Learning to be good at creativity will be the best preparation for the future that our children can possibly have. The Lifestyle of Learning™ Approach to home education leads parents to release their children into creativity.

Creativity comes from investigation, discovery, imagination, and problem solving. Everyone is born with a creative nature because we are made in God’s image. You can clearly see these activities at work in young children. They are constantly investigating, discovering, imagining, and solving the problems that come to them as they are trying to do what they imagine.

People create things when they join things already known, through investigation and discovery, into new arrangements and combinations to bring about something new. That new thing must first be imagined by the creator, and the problems that arise when attempting to create it must be solved. None of these skills are at work in our children during traditional schoolish assignments. School work not only robs children of the time needed to be creative, it actually squashes and kills the desire and the ability to be creative. That is why most people think they are not creative. It is because they went to school!

Lifestyle of Learning™ kids are so creative because they are given the opportunity to grow into who God made them to be by leaving off the artificial assignments of traditional school methods, and naturally cultivating the creativity they were born with. In other words, abundant creativity is a normal human condition. A lack of creativity is actually a stunted and malformed human condition.

When I read Marilyn Howshall’s Wisdom’s Way of Learning, which explains the Lifestyle of Learning™ Approach, I stopped the schoolish assignments I was putting on my children. I not only let my daughter draw much more, I validated her creativity by teaching her more and more drawing skills. Her ability to think and communicate naturally grew alongside her ability to express herself in drawing along with many other creative projects. Creativity burst forth, and her true education took off.

I love how Creativity Expert Ken Robinson, Professor of Arts Education, explains our culture’s need for creativity and the reason our modern idea of education is so twisted toward producing UNcreative people.

Won’t you investigate Lifestyle of Learning™, and release your children into creativity?