I grew up surrounded by books and older siblings; colouring pencils, newspaper, chapatti dough and pots and pans were our toys and the living room and back garden, our playground.
We would use pillows as rafts to escape the crocodiles that swam across our living room floor and sometimes we performed intricately choreographed dance moves inspired by Janet Jackson and classic Bollywood songs.
Today our own three children inhabit that space of creativity and resourcefulness, using our home as their learning labyrinth!
Mr. Tickle lives in our shed, a big bad witch lives next door and the Grinch resides in our packed attic. These fictional friends have become a tool for distraction – a useful device to disperse unwanted behaviour, but most importantly to encourage and stimulate creative minds.
We try to promote imaginative thinking and call on them to utilize their improvisational skills as it assists with all the core subjects and key areas of learning; Eleven Plus, GCSEs, Maths, English, Sciences, and special needs. It also helps students to visualize problem-solving questions and unscramble dense texts. It’s a lovely way to grasp a wealth of comprehension skills such as inference and deduction. By calling on our children to use their imaginations we can create our future generations of entrepreneurs and problem solvers! How is your home a learning labyrinth, and what do you do to help promote your children’s imagination?