Creativity CAN Grow

// Filed in: Across the Learning Spectrum

I spoke with a parent that was sad because her autistic son could just not play with things like play dough. Even with legos, she described that her son could only create what the instructions outlined, and once he put that puzzle together, he’d be done. For her, it felt like pulling creativity out of him was impossible. But I think the real challenge here, what’s really happening, is a description of the strength of a muscle, and giving that muscle a chance to lift the weights that it is capable of lifting. And that’s why incremental learning is so important, and why we created Pirate’s Guide to be so incremental. To think of it like exercise - you start with the arm weight that your arm can carry, and you slowly over time build that up until that muscle gets stronger and you can lift heavier and heavier weights. The same is true with creativity. For her son, he could only “lift weights” of following detailed instructions.

The goal isn’t to pull creativity out of our kids, but to help them build them muscles so that it can come out naturally.

So now here is something that I find really interesting. Professional storytellers struggle with these exact same things. They feel that their muscles are not strong enough either. I asked Chris about it, and he reminded me that story is one of the most complicated things that we as humans can do. In a sense, it’s harder than rocket science. So he spent years (literally, years) trying to find a way to break down story into smaller parts, that would make it more manageable. This made sense to me. When you have something that is complicated, you break it down into the most simple, basic things, and then focus on those one at a time. That is essentially what we are doing when we teach kids English grammar - things like nouns and predicates and subjects and adjectives and clauses; all those really scary words that we come across in English grammar are just these small, simple things that make up sentences. Taken one at a time, we can master them, and in turn, master sentences, and the paragraphs, and then pages. So Chris’s goal was to make story as simple and as straightforward and gentle as possible for everyone.

And in doing this, he inadvertently made it accessible to kids with learning needs. Kids on the autistic spectrum. Kids that have attention disorder, kids that are not professionals. And that’s the great irony - the problem that professionals have is the exact same problem all of us have. Your kids aren’t any different than kids who are academically gifted and excelling in their school. We all need a gentle, slow, straightforward path to the destination to which we want to go.

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