Making Thinking Matter
In 2006 Capture Arts, Greenwich Early Years Service and the Art in Perpetuity Trust (APT) decided to collaborate to develop an art and creative thinking project. We decided to give pre school children aged three to five an opportunity to work in an open ended way using art as a vehicle and underpinning the workshops with the de Bono Six Thinking Hats system.
Capture delivered a series of workshops in four early years settings in Greenwich. We discovered that when art and the creative thinking tools were combined it enabled children to think openly and creatively with very little adult intervention.
We realised that these findings were very important and that we wanted to develop the project further.
Greenwich Early Years Service and Capture Arts decided to collaborate together again to build on the discoveries and develop the ideas that had resulted from the first project, we wanted to discover how pre school children think, and how their ability to think in a divergent way could be nurtured and developed further. We wanted to study the thought processes, then to evaluate the milestones and outcomes. We undertook the second phase of the project in Greenwich at The Robert Owen Early Years Centre.
This time we worked more extensively with practitioners and parents, offering a parents’ workshop and a more in-depth inset for practitioners that included an introduction to the thinking methods of Edward de Bono and a practical art and problem-solving workshop.
The project focused on the children but also studied how practitioners and parents used language, both directly and indirectly, to steer the outcomes of the children’s creative processes and what they expected the outcome of these processes to be.
An important part of the workshops was that before embarking on a task children were taken through a series of questions about the properties of materials, what they knew about a particular subject,
how they felt about a task, theme or material etc. This created an atmosphere of anticipation and excitement before the children undertook the practical task. It also gave the children increased confidence as they had been thinking about ideas and information before the task. When children began the practical side of the workshop, we discovered that they were more thoughtful, concentrated more and created very meaningful work. They stayed on task three times longer than usual and needed very little support from adults; even in large groups the children appeared calm and focused. We noticed in particular the willingness of boy’s to stay on a creative task and undertake the workshop without any problems or desire to be doing anything else!
We decided not to use glue, sticking materials or scissors during the second phase of the project.
Following this we continued the MTM programme with Merton Early Years Service with funding from Merton Council and Unltd. We worked in five nursery settings and for the first time worked with children as young as two. What became very apparent during this project was the need to work more extensively with practitioners to enable them to build their confidence in using the thinking tools and develop creative ideas about their settings, including free flow play, how to organise thinking sessions for children and, how to engage parents etc. We need to support practitioners in learning how to develop an atmosphere of open-ended exploration, self-discovery, freedom of expression and cultivation of ideas. We have been given funding from Unltd to develop a prototype toolkit for the Merton settings that will be left with each of the practitioners after the workshops.