Monday, May 7, 2007

Children's Creativity

CASE I:
Little Thean attended my music lessons as usual and on-time every week. He is my moody student and he's just 5 years old. He loves music and he will cooperate with me if he's in good mood, meaning he will do theory as instructed and play the piano without any nagging. Otherwise, he will talks non-stop to avoid playing on the piano.
These few weeks I was surprised by his creativity in using drawing and art skills when doing his theory. One time the sticker of a minim rest printed wrongly from the look it should be (become a semibreve rest) and I was blank on what to do as the answer was minim rest. Before I'm able to say a word, my little student already suggested to put it upside down so that it looks like a minim rest. What a Good Idea!
Another surprise is colouring flowers for the correct answer and I was expecting him to have one colour for one flower but you guess what! Little Thean coloured the flower in sections! Not only that, it's in vertical and horizontal sections which he drawn by himself. Then some more add 2-3 colors onto one flower.


CASE II:
Little Andrew is abit hyperactive. He's a new student and has no focus when comes to the last 10 minutes of the lesson. He did the colouring very simple as long as the colours sit in the place without filling up the whole space, he consider that as done. I'm glad that even so, he will seperate out different the colour for different item.
For example, there are 2 answer for selection, either it's a minim or semibreve. For young beginner's theory books, there are lots of colouring and playing with stickers. So, it happened that the answer is drawn inside a car. Meaning we have 1 car for minim and 1 car for semibreve. Then the child needs to colour the correct answer. I thought Andrew was not that patient in colouring and since he always doesn't fill the blank with full colour but to my surprise he still insisted the car is red, the window is blue and the tyre is black colour. For an active child to do this, it really need more patience and of course I gave him "Good" and stars not because of his colouring (his colouring can consider bad if you are a perfectionist) but because of his attempt to perfect his work.
We all have a similiarity, that is we are LEFTIE! They really have good imaginations and in fact I really encourage them to do as what comes to their mind even it's always end up a messy page. That's what I call CREATIVITY!

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