Wow! First blog of the year and it’s already over half way through January. Good job that wasn’t my new year’s resolution…or was it?! I’m excited about blogging this year. It’s time to look out for a whole load of new threads and features. I’m starting you off today with something I value hugely in life. Creativity. We live in a creative world. Everywhere we look there are creative things around us, from actual creation to man-made wonders. Take a minute to look up from this blog and notice what is around you. You may be in an office – computers are a result of an extremely clever person’s creative brain, the flowers on your desk (ow, lucky) are creation itself sitting right in front of you, the scarf your colleague puts around their neck as they wrap up to head out for their lunch break has been beautifully knitted by their creative mother. You may be taking five whilst your little one has a nap (really, taking five…please let me know the secret). The cup of tea you are holding is the result of creative tea pickers forming teabags on the other side of the world for your enjoyment, the playdoh plastered on the floor was your own bout of creativity as you ambitiously mixed together flour, cream of tartar and oil, not to mention the pink food colouring with a one year old eager to play. Creativity is all around us.
I learnt very early in my days of teaching that I was going to have to let go of my perfectionist streak. Creativity doesn’t have to be perfect. If a mounted picture had a boarder that was 2-3mm out I just had to turn my eyes from it. As much as it pained me to do so I quickly found out that teaching as a perfectionist could totally take over your life. Now, don’t hear me wrong, I believe it is important to do the best at your job that you can, but I also think it’s even more important to have a life. So wonky boarders (and before you think I was some slap-dash teacher let me say, they weren’t that wonky) had to become acceptable.
The project Poppi (my three (and-a-half) year old daughter) embarked on the other week was far from a perfect product but an exciting process which meant she didn’t want to stop in the park on the way home from school (thank goodness, it’s been freezing) but instead wanted to rush home to crack on. A few nights before I had been tucking Poppi up in bed and one by one wrapping up her toys in their blanket and trying to create space for Poppi to put her head on the pillow. As a passing comment I suggested that her toys could do with a bed of their own. And that was it. The creative light was switched on and the next day we set about gathering what we might need to make a bed for the toys.
Poppi is a pink fanatic (a little too obsessed for my liking) so we both knew that pink was going to have to feature on this bed. You can find all kinds of sickly pink cots online but I decided we were going to keep it creative and use what we had around the house.
You will need:
A large (ish) box
Craft knife
Scraps of wrapping paper
PVA glue and spreaders/paint brushes
Scissors
Patience
Firstly Poppi set about choosing the wrapping paper she wanted to make our patch-work cot. She can be trusted with scissors and actually loves cutting so greatly enjoyed snipping bits of paper into squares and other various (probably unnamed) shapes. Whilst she did this I used the craft knife to shape the box into a more cot-like shape. I used a template to make sure both sides were more-or-less (see the perfectionism holding off) the same.
This was all we had time for on the first evening. However, the excitement for Poppi of planning the next stage and the skill of learning to be patient until the next day came were all valuable and part of the creative process (see creativity is educational as well).
After school the next day we were straight back to it. I mixed PVA glue with a little water and we set about sticking our pre-cut shapes on to the box. I encouraged Poppi to paint the glue over the shapes as well as under to help them stick and be a bit stronger. At first Poppi was not keen on this idea as she was worried we wouldn’t see the paper properly. So a lesson in trust too. Another day passed.
The following day was Friday and Friday is Poppi and Mummy day until school time. We spent the morning painting the inside of the box (pink) but soon decided that this hadn’t worked as well as we had hoped so instead re-evaluated and decided to cover the inside of the box with patchwork too. A lesson in learning from our mistakes.
After school, we returned to a dry box and a bed for all the toys. Simple, yet effective.
