Early Childcare Assistant

The Importance of Creativity: What Students in Early Childcare Assistant College Should Know

March 01, 2019

March 1, 2019

early childcare instructor helping children
Creativity is a natural part of childhood and it helps children develop essential skills, like problem-solving, empathy, and reasoning, that will serve them well for the rest of their lives. While children are naturally creative, early childcare assistants play a big role in helping to develop and foster this creativity.

Whether your early childcare assistant career sees you working in a daycare, preschool, or other related setting, you’ll have plenty of opportunity to create environments that encourage children’s creativity. Here are a few things you should know about creativity and why it matters for your career as an early childcare assistant.

Early Childcare Assistant Training Can Help You Foster Creativity in Children
When people talk about creativity, they often confuse it with the final products that are the result of creativity, such as a painting or a play. However, creativity is not about creating a product; rather, it is a process that encourages open-ended discovery and exploration. This process allows children to develop original ideas on their own, which in turn has benefits for many areas of their life. As an early childcare assistant, you can help create environments that allow children to fully express their creativity.

Children are naturally creative and your role after early childcare assistant training is not so much to direct but to foster this creativity. So, instead of saying things like, ‘Now we are going to draw a house,’ which focuses less on the process and more on the goal, you can simply give children paper, crayons, and other materials and see what they create. When it comes to creativity, there is no right or wrong way of doing it. By providing children with a supportive, non-judgemental environment, you’ll allow their imaginations to run wild.

Early Childcare Assistants Know That Creativity Is Valuable for More Than Just Art
A common misconception about creativity is that it is only useful for those pursuing artistic fields, like music or design. However, creativity is used every day by professionals in all sorts of different industries. Scientists use creative thinking, for example, to hypothesize new studies and experiments, while structural engineers use creativity to come up with solutions for how buildings and bridges will actually stand up.

Creativity allows children to find original solutions to problems rather than simply copying a solution given to them by an adult. By giving children the chance to explore their creativity and problem-solve freely, you are setting them up to become creative thinkers in their adult years no matter what field they work in.

Encouraging Different Types of Creativity Will Help Children Develop Different Skills
An important part of studying at an early childcare assistant college is learning how to create environments that encourage children’s social, physical, emotional, and cognitive skills. It just so happens that different types of creativity play a big role in developing these various skills in children.

For example, allowing children to play with building blocks encourages their fine motor, reasoning, and problem-solving skills since they learn for themselves how to create structures that don’t fall down. On the other hand, giving groups of children puppets to play with encourages social and emotional development as they interact and cooperate with one another to create imaginary worlds and storylines. During your career, you can help craft different play environments for children that help them develop different types of skills.

Creative activities like building blocks help children develop fine motor and problem-solving skills

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Contact Medix College to learn more about our early childcare assistant diploma!

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