Creativity Tackle Box

Book excerpt: The Creativity Tackle Box offers strategies, games, exercises, and thinker tools to help students practice thinking more creatively. Some strategies limber their creative minds. Others help solve real problems in a creative way. These activities practice fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration; risk taking, preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification - Torrance's, Williams' and Wallas' components that help define the theory of creative thought. So, what can we learn about creativity and how to teach it? It is important to let go, to feel free to take chances, to fail, and to try again. And not just in art class - in any class. Teachers need to allow breathing room for students and need to cultivate an accepting atmosphere for students to create. The activities in The Creativity Tackle Box remind educators to allow students to feel the joy and satisfaction they get from making something new, thinking something novel, and doing something real as they use their creativity to solve real problems.