Creativity and Artistic Expression: Thinking with Materials and Young Children

Gretchen Reynolds, co-author of The Play’s the Thing: Teachers’ Roles in Children’s Play, and Kathy Boelsma, Lead Collaborator with ReCognition invite you to become attentive to children’s thought processes as they use aesthetic materials to express ideas and challenges in an atelier encounter.

We will explore how to better understand the processes of creative thinking: how creativity supports the transformation of expression and the transformation of our own ways of seeing and interacting with the world. We will reflect on pedagogical practices that enable educators to identify, name, and extend  children’s creative processes embedded in multiple poetic languages.

We invite you to explore the poetic languages of the atelier through play and inventiveness at several ateliers: an atelier of graphic materials, an atelier of sculpture, an atelier of technology, and an atelier of natural materials.

Please bring a notebook and camera for your own documentation.