This giveaway has now closed. Thank you for entering! Everyone’s entries were so wonderful. What creative children everyone has! All of the entries were so fabulous, it was impossible to choose just one winner, so, I contacted Jillian Riley and she has generously agreed to give away TWO copies of her book! Thank you Jillian! And the winners are:
Lauren Ernst who wrote: Both of my boys (ages 6 & 3 ) LOVE imaginative play! They become animals like puppies in a pet shop, eagles flying above our local river, or crime stoppers solving crimes of safety! 
It is so fun to watch them build their habitats and pet stores to help them act out these scenarios. One thing that I wish my children were better at is creative problem solving, i’d love to gain ideas to help them look beyond standard solutions. I feel as though this would help to open their eyes to the bigger picture of the world!
AND
Jodie who wrote: My sons favourite way to be creative is with boxes – to date we have made a box kitchen (stove, washing machine, fridge), box cars and planes, box cities, box robots and more to come. Love to learn more about creating creative spaces in our new home – as we are just setting up now. Congrats on the book!
Congratulations! I have sent you both an email.
I am so excited to be sharing this with you today. I have just finished reading Raising a Creative Kid: Simple Strategies for Igniting and Nurturing that Creative Spark, a new eBook written by Jillian Riley, author and creator of A Mom With a Lesson Plan. Jillian’s passion for creativity comes through on every page – it’s impossible to read this book and not be inspired by her energy and enthusiasm. She shows just how easy it is to be a facilitator of creativity for your children – even if you don’t see yourself as creative at all.
As parents, we are our children’s first and most important teachers. We know how important it is foster our children’s imaginations and nurture their creativity but creativity is so much more than producing great works of art or writing stories. By providing our kids with opportunities to create and imagine, we are giving them the tools they need to problem solve and think outside the box. Creativity makes our children inventive, not just when it comes to art and craft, but in every part of their life.
It’s not always easy though, to foster creativity in our children, especially if we don’t think of ourselves as creative. In her book, Jillian explains how we are all creative, and she explains simple, practical ways that you can foster your child’s creativity every day. Sometimes I find difficult to find balance in fostering R’s creativity. I don’t want to take over and lead him in his creative process but at the same time, leaving him to his own devices can sometimes make him feel overwhelmed and lost. That’s what I found most exciting about this book – Jillian shows us how to be facilitators, rather than leaders, in our children’s creativity. After reading this book I’ve learned how to offer suggestions, provide materials and help the creative idea move along without taking over.
In Raising a Creative Kid: Simple Strategies for Igniting and Nurturing that Creative Spark you will learn about
- putting together your play space
- setting up a creative art area
- learning to accept and appreciate mistakes (it’s all about process not product after all!)
Jillian has also included links to 50 inspiring blog posts about fostering creativity! How could you not be inspired after that?
WIN A COPY OF RAISING A CREATIVE KID!
I am so excited and honoured that Jillian has kindly offered to give away a copy of Raising a Creative Kid: Simple Strategies for Igniting and Nurturing that Creative Spark to one of my lovely readers! Thank you Jillian! If you would like to order your own copy of the book right now, simply follow the links in this post or on my sidebar. Otherwise, read on for how to enter.
- Entry is open to residents WORLDWIDE.
- Entries will close at 7am, Monday July 16, 2012, AEST (Australian Eastern Standard Time)
- To enter, simply leave a comment below, telling me your child’s/student’s favourite way to be creative. Perhaps they like to create with lego, or blocks or painting. Perhaps they enjoy dressing up or solving jigsaw puzzles.
- That’s it! Just leave a comment and the most creative answer, as chosen by my hubby, will win! In accordance with state law where I reside, I cannot hold a giveaway where the winner is determined randomly (by chance). Any giveaways I hold need to be selected on skill. I will keep it neutral by asking my husband to select the winner. The winner will be announced on Monday July 16, 2012. They will be notified by email, announced on Facebook and on this post.
GOOD LUCK!
Disclosure: This post was written entirely by me. The words and opinions expressed in this post are entirely my own. I was given a copy of Raising a Creative Kid: Simple Strategies for Igniting and Nurturing that Creative Spark to read and keep as well as a second copy to give away to one of my readers. I am also an affiliate with Raising a Creative Kid and I receive a commission on sales of the book generated from my site.
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Both of my boys love to create with their hands and imagination….rocks become bombs, sticks become scorcerer’s wands and wild animals become their pets. We love the outdoors and with the world at their fingertips….anything is possible
My daughter loves horses and since she was tiny she pretends to either be a horse or be a princess with a horse, etc. She colors horses, her favorite is to draw a rainbow horse.
My 5 yr old daughter loves creative role play with her dolls. Her latest doll adventure was a camping scene. Dolls sitting around a campfire made out of dominoes, toy pick up trucks became camping chairs and the sleeping bags were made from old wool hats. The conversation from one doll to the next as they observed a ‘gummy worm’, “oh look a banana slug! How lovely”
I have three lovely daughters, ages 4, 6, 11 & each of them have a creative streak. Their favorite way to be creative is to journal. There are journals everywhere in our house & each is filled with colorful pictures of little girls, flowers & animals. My oldest fills them with fun stories about dogs, dishes & sissy lala (her own character).
Children in my Waldorf kindergarten adore creating with beeswax and wet on wet technique. They also like to play with felted dolls and creating small puppet shows. Best regards from Croatia, Europe!
My son is obsessed with his Legos. That is definitely his downtime/creative time.
My 2 year old son, Brayden, LOVES trucks and trains, especially tow trucks. His favorite way to be creative is (try) put cars (and other toys) on his tow trucks on push/pull them. A certain red tow truck of his actually moves like a really long bed truck!, so he is always fascinated with pulling it and moving it around. He also puts other cars/trucks together to push them together, unfortunately all these things do not go to together he they never move far.
My girls (4 and 2) love to play outside woth natural materials! I like to put out playdough or cornstarch goop and they add sand, sticks, rocks, leaves and flowers to it! They also love painting on our homemade outdoor acrylic easel and sticking leaves to the paint!!
Both of my boys (ages 6 & 3 ) LOVE imaginative play! They become animals like puppies in a pet shop, eagles flying above our local river, or crime stoppers solving crimes of safety!
It is so fun to watch them build their habitats and pet stores to help them act out these scenarios. One thing that I wish my children were better at is creative problem solving, i’d love to gain ideas to help them look beyond standard solutions. I feel as though this would help to open their eyes to the bigger picture of the world!
my children love playing with their blankets and pillows to make houses/forts/hospitals. my living room is often “converted” to an emergency room and they take turns “fixing” each other.
My daughter is super creative and loves to play with your typical paints, playdough and crafts. What I love about her is she sees the world as toys…from tapping branches together to making food art to humming along with nature’s sounds. What amazes me is that she can create a song on the fly with melodies and catchy words. She has made rock art on her wall, sticking rocks she has found onto her wall. She has used a report folder binder spine as a kazoo and she is constantly helping me see the beauty of the environment around her. I pray she always has this sense of wonder and see possibilities for the whole of her life. Her latest talent was to blow up a balloon with her nose! lol
I believe that my second child comes from a differnt time! Her creativity blows my mind! She is the younger of my two girls and give her “lemons” and she will make “lemonade”! She has a zest for life that fuels her passion for using her imagination! It comes so natural for her! I have to work at it with my 10 year old!
I leave a huge box of silks, cloths, drapes, sheets outside in the backyard. They make clothes, capes, belly dancing outfits, theatre plays on the cloths line, camoflauge their hollow, decorate fairy spaces, decorate for a party and clothes for their dolls all with various colored material. The neighborhood kids have also been into making fairy houses or gnome hideouts out of natural materials in natural spaces.
My 5-year old daughter is already practicing the ancient art of storytelling. She creates worlds and spaces in her head, giving them interesting names (like the Dandle-Doodle, which is a hole in the ground that takes you to an underwater world with friendly sharks and singing starfish), then concocts little adventures using her family, friends, imaginary characters, or storybook/movie characters, like Alice, as her subjects. Occasionally, she will also tell her stories using a cast of characters made from puppets. Recently, she and her little brother (3 years-old) have also started playing “Lost Car City,” a place she has invented that is loosely based on the Cars movie (to placate her brother who is Cars obsessed). The cars are Superheroes, villains, and plain ol’ car folk. She has cast herself into the starring role of Mayor, who is also an extreme Superhero force to be reckoned with. Her creativity can be astounding – sometimes it’s hard to bring her back to boring old Earth.
My days are filled with my son’s fantastical stories. Friendly dragons, giant flying spiders, astronaut wizards and genial pirates regularly visit our home and some have become permanent fixtures. We have maps to identify where these fantastical friends are now and what they are doing in their adventures across the world.
My 2 year old has a very vivid imagination! He loves to play “scary monsters”. He will make up these story lines about where the monster is, who he’s chasing after and whether or not it’s a tickle monster or will eat you up. Every blanket becomes a hideaway, and sometimes these stories involve other family members as well. I try to encourage where I can, listening to his plan of action, following his instructions and I’m hoping to find a few monster crafts to aid his interest in continuing the story line:)
My 3 year old son love to be creative with anything that pours. It can be sand, water, paint, beads, rocks it really does not matter to him. He loves to pour things from buckets, down ramps, into other buckets etc.
My 6 year old daughter loves to be creative painting and creating her own games to play. My 4 year old daughter likes to create using pretend play. The other day she rolled up some toilet paper, stuck it in between her legs and said, “look at my wee wee!” Yikes! So, this book would be especially helpful for me to help her find more productive ways to foster her creativity!
My little girl turns 3 soon. She loves loves to paint. Our walls are cover in oil and acrylic paintings. She is so proud of them. If she isn’t painting she is coloring or drawing. My little artist
My little 10 month old girl LOVES to play in the water (especially our cat’s water bowl) and loves anything that has a LOT of color. Our favorite thing is dyed ice cubes. We put food coloring in water and freeze in ice cube trays then we dump one at a time in a huge tub of water. We let her wear a white onesie so by the time she is done her shirt is tie dyed.
I have 5 gifted children. Some gifts are really good, and some are well, really daunting! One loves drawing on graph paper, the next, well let us just say nothing is sacred when she get going! She uses wire, metal tape, disposable forks, fabric….my clothing…eye shadow. The next took the doors off my cabinets. The 4TH, my walls will never be the same and the operettas are amazing! The fifth thinks self expression through painting her body with breakfast is the only way to eat, and loves painting in the tub.
A little help in directing all this madness would be bliss!
My 4y old loves to draw just anything she can think of after a good game of “dressing-up” or dancing around unless she is having a blast in creative singing by mixing lyrics and music of well known children songs
My 4 year old son, Uriah, loves to build cities for his cars and dinosaurs. We put masking tape on the floor for the roads, he colors cardboard boxes for buildings or rocks, and even toilet paper tubes for car tunnels. The cars and dinosaurs race and chase each other. He will get out the foam blocks (the triangle ones) and use them as ramps to jump over the dinosaurs. It amazes me the different ways he can play with the cities, cars and dinosaurs.
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My almost 2 years old daughter loves to paint and her passion for the last couple of months is building with legos. She’s really good at it. This book would help me to give her some directions to be more creative and to foster her creativity. xoxo from Croatia, Europe
JR and I played “Farmers’ Market” the other day. She just amazes me with the ideas she comes up with. I just help implement. She also likes to play “hotel”!
oops. clicked too soon and forgot my blog address!
Hi
My 3 years old Daughter makes up her own stories. I often set out a playspace and then she uses the characters to make an elaborate story. Usally along the lines of other books but with her own twist.
My sons favourite way to be creative is with boxes – to date we have made a box kitchen (stove, washing machine, fridge), box cars and planes, box cities, box robots and more to come. Love to learn more about creating creative spaces in our new home – as we are just setting up now. Congrats on the book!
Our fiver year old daughter is a story-teller. Her performance-style story telling keeps us entertained just about on a daily basis. As she’s still in a Waldorf Kindergarten – thus not writing herself yet – I’ve taken to rewriting the stories on my computer, and printing them in booklet format. She then illustrates each page and creates a cover. Depending on the length of the story it takes us ±1 week to complete – doing an illustration or two per day in whatever medium takes her fancy at the time.
My 2.5 year old’s favourite way to be creative is by making up songs. All the nursery rhymes now feature mummy, daddy, herself and baby Jude or what we ate having for tea etc and several Beatles’ classics feature us too eg ‘Hey Jude also has a ‘Hey Sofia’ verse. I need this book because I am not as creative as her!
My 2 year old son loves to dress up, as well as dressing my wife and myself up in cloths to pretend we’re anything at all. We now have a wardrobe in our play room that is filled with cloths and toys from old Halloween outfits of a Cat to Lions. We can be a Doctor or Nurse we can be a Dinosaur or Thomass the Train and I have a top hat that my son makes me where so I’m Sir Topham Hatt. We love it.