Creativity Quiz!

Spring has sprung! The air is light, the flowers are blooming, the sun is shining, and the substitutes are being booked. If you are a teacher like myself, spring is a huge jumble of deadlines, art shows, and meetings. Many of these require absences from the classroom, and the problem of meaningful, yet simple, one day projects begins to eat at you. What could possibly be beneficial in art that realistically takes ONE DAY?!? My answer is...anything that fosters creativity.
We are stuck in the middle of an educational era fixated on standardized tests, when in fact, our children's success depends on their ability to solve issues in a unique manor. Nothing that forces children to think outside of the box is frivolous. Creativity is a life skill.

I was thinking of ways to get my students thinking creatively, in one class period. Of course there is writing, and there is sketching, and there are puzzles. All very inside of the box answers to a very outside of the box issue. So, I began to use my noodle. I was looking around on my desk, and saw my stapler. Now, normally a stapler would not serve as a trigger for such an exercise, however I happened to have purchased funny eyeball stickers one year. Being a woman who enjoys humor, i decorated almost every inanimate object in my room with them. So, there was my stapler, staring back at me (with angry eyes, no less). I thought the kids might like to change the stapler, to morph it into something or someone else, so I quickly ran down to the copy machine and put my angry stapler under the cover. ( I wish you could have seen the look on the ELA teacher's face, as she waited to use the machine next.) The only instructions I left were to use colored pencils to build a drawing using the stapler, a found object. I also asked that they not label anything they drew, to provide enough details, so that words were unnecessary. I suppose in the future I might leave an article on Surrealism, and ask for an artist's statement or creative story to go along with the activity.

I'm pretty happy with the results. I have to admit, I chuckled out loud on a few occasions, which I consider a major plus. Nothing is worse than grading 150 drawings of the same exact thing. I am already thinking of our next morph! A spatula? A whisk? A remote control? Hmmmm......I'll be back, my creative juices are running wild. :)