As a mother and educator, I am now, like many across the globe, working to find a new normal with my elementary aged kids at home. With everything so up in the air, I’m finding myself grateful for the training and experience I have in creativity, so I thought I would share the first two things I did when my kids’ school was closed.

Embrace the Challenge.
This is a creativity skill. When we run into a problem, we are more able to handle it with resilience and creativity if we see it as a challenge to be faced. This attitude is going to be necessary many, many times while we are social distancing. My kids miss their friends, they need things to do while I work, we’re not used to everyone being home all day every day. Challenges are going to appear. So, when they do, we put on our creative thinking hats and state the problem as a question:

• “How might we organize our day?”

• “How to connect with friends and family?” 

When the going gets tough, this is what we are going to try to do - recognize the challenge, state it as a question, and then engage in divergent thinking.

What is Divergent Thinking?

Divergent Thinking is a foundational building block of creativity. In my house, once we recognized the challenge before us, I gathered the kids and pulled out a pack of sticky notes and the magic words of divergent thinking: “What might be all the…?” 

We focused on what the kids could do while at home for the next while. I wrote “What might be all the things to do?” and we started coming up with as many ideas as we could. We wrote each one down on a sticky note without judgment. Divergent thinking is all about letting ideas flow freely and accepting others’ ideas. We came up with over 50 ideas in a pretty short amount of time, and I left the sticky notes out so we can continue to add. 

We don’t know a lot about what is going to happen in the next few weeks, but we do know it’s going to require the best of our resilience and creativity, and our children are going to see and learn from the way adults respond.  

Through this, I hope my children learn that we can work together to make the best of a hard situation, that we can problem solve creatively, and that we are here for each other in hard times, ready to face challenges.

There are lots of amazing ideas for parents and children on the internet. I urge you also to spend time coming up with your own ideas together as a family. We can give our children the gift of learning how to confront the many challenges they will face in life as they grow.

Here’s a fun divergent thinking activity we like to do with kids to get them thinking flexibly.

About Sara: Sara Smith is Creative Education Development Manager for FableVision Learning. She holds a Master of Science in creativity from the International Center for Studies in Creativity at SUNY College at Buffalo. Sara is compelled by learning and its intersection with creativity, and her vision is to develop and support creative communities that help people to grow and to nurture their passions and strengths.