4.4 Areas of Learning and Development

Creative Development

Requirements

Children's creativity must be extended by the provision of support for their curiosity, exploration and play. They must be provided with opportunities to explore and share their thoughts, creativity, ideas and feelings, for example, through a variety of art, music, movement, dance, imaginative and role-play activities, mathematics, and design and technology.

Aspects of Creative Development

Creative Development is made up of the following aspects:

Being Creative – Responding to Experiences, Expressing and Communicating Ideas – is about how children respond in a variety of ways to what they see, hear, smell, touch or feel and how, as a result of these encounters, they express and communicate their own ideas, thoughts and feelings.

Exploring Media and Materials – is about children's independent and guided exploration of and engagement with a widening range of media and materials, finding out about, thinking about and working with colour, texture, shape, space and form in two and three dimensions.

Creating Music and Dance – is about children's independent and guided explorations of sound, movement and music. Focusing on how sounds can be made and changed and how sounds can be recognised and repeated from a pattern, it includes ways of exploring movement, matching movements to music and singing simple songs from memory.

Developing Imagination and Imaginative Play – is about how children are supported to develop and build their imaginations through stories, role-plays, imaginative play, dance, music, design, and art.

What Creative Development means for children

• Creativity is about taking risks and making connections and is strongly linked to play.
• Creativity emerges as children become absorbed in action and explorations of their own ideas, expressing them through movement, making and transforming things using media and materials such as crayons, paints, scissors, words, sounds, movement, props and make-believe.
• Creativity involves children in initiating their own learning and making choices and decisions.
• Children's responses to what they see, hear and experience through their senses are individual and the way they represent their experiences is unique and valuable.
• Being creative enables babies and children to explore many processes, media and materials and to make new things emerge as a result.

The attached videos demonstrate various aspects of creative development in practice.