3 activities to nurture creativity in the classroom

Laura Vazquez
Overhead shot of young childrens' arms playing with blocks and toys

What keeps people from exercising their creative potential? From negative past experiences to the way we see ourselves, there are many things that can hold us back, no matter how old we are. As teachers, it’s our job to help each individual find out what their creative barriers are, whether internal, external or imagined.

Our classrooms, therefore, need to become places where we nourish emotional safety and welcome mistakes. As such, we should encourage a culture that promotes failing as part of learning. 

Here are three activities to help nurture creativity in the primary classroom.

Activity one: My whole self

In this activity, students express themselves in words and images, using a life-sized drawing of their bodies. The aim of this is to help them share their feelings and ideas. With a little adaptation, it can work just as well with teens and young learners. 
Before the lesson, ensure you have enough cardboard or paper for each student. Each piece will need to be approximately 2m long. If you’re using paper, roll it into tubes, so it’s easier to distribute to each student later.

In class, hand out the paper/cardboard to each student. Tell them to draw a life-size outline of themselves on the paper. Students working online can copy the outline you share onto a large piece of paper. They can do this in their notebooks if they don’t have any paper to hand. 

In teen classes

Tell the students that they are free to use their creativity. They should draw, write, and express themselves however they want. If they are stuck for ideas, ask them:

  • How do you feel?
  • What are your ambitions?
  • What are you worried about?
  • What do you enjoy?
  • What are you looking forward to?

Note that questions should be adapted to your students’ age and level of English. 

During the activity, your students can use colors, stickers, magazines – and anything that will help them express what is in their minds and hearts. 

A note on using this activity in elementary classes

Primary-aged students will need more support. Here are some example instructions:

  • In your right hand, write what you do when you feel frustrated.
  • In your right foot, write your favorite song.
  • In your left leg, write the name of the person you get good advice from.
  • In your right arm, write what makes you happy.
  • In your left hand, write your greatest dream.
  • In your left foot, write which cartoon character you would like to be.
  • In your left leg, write what you like to do in your free time.
  • In your left arm, write things you value the most.
  • On your stomach write your favorite meal.

Afterwards, students should explain what they’ve included in their silhouettes to the rest of the class. Encourage students to ask each other respectful questions. 

Activity two: Message in the box

The aim of this activity is to establish a routine where students can share their ideas, thoughts and feelings on a regular basis. 

Have students bring an old box into class (of any type). Encourage them to personalize their boxes with decorative paper, markers, crayons, stickers, etc. 

Instruct students to write an idea, feeling, thought or question down. The complexity of the task will depend on the grade you teach and their level of English. Topic ideas include:

  • What are you grateful for today?
  • How do you feel today? 
  • What do you wish for?
  • What do you do when you’re angry?
  • What do you like most about yourself?

Have your students write their answers and put them in the box. When everyone has finished, they should take turns to choose a piece of paper at random and read it out loud to the group. 

Wrap up this activity by asking the class, “What things do we have in common as a group?”. This way students will see that everyone has similar worries and dreams and hopefully they’ll be more willing to talk about their feelings in future classes.

Keep the box in a safe place and review the notes after a month to see if peoples' thoughts and feelings have changed since they did the activity.

Activity three: Activity story board

The ideal class environment is one where students feel challenged, but not overwhelmed.  The aim of this activity is to have students reflect on the challenges they have faced in their day-to-day learning and think about what they need to do to improve. 

On a blank piece of paper, ask students to draw two vertical lines and one horizontal line to form six boxes. They should number each box from 1 to 6. Students should then write a challenge or objective in box number six. It should be something that they would like to improve, for example, studying habits, reading skills, doing homework, getting better at exam results, etc. Then encourage them to think of five things they can do to help them reach their objective and write them in boxes 1-5. 

  1. Read at least two paragraphs every day
  2. Draw what I think is the main idea on paper.
  3. Look up the meaning of words I don´t understand.
  4. Try to increase the number of paragraphs I read each week.
  5. Make a monthly progress chart  to see if I have improved. If not, I need to work on another strategy.
  6. My objective:  Ex. Get better at reading comprehension quizzes.

Provide students with your support and constructive feedback. Have them share their objectives with the rest of the class and every couple of weeks check how they are doing. 
Remember to praise their ideas and efforts to improve. Students are more motivated when they feel their teachers are invested in their success.

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    Grammar: how to tame the unruly beast

    By Simon Buckland

    “Grammar, which knows how to control even kings”- ѴDZè

    When you think of grammar, “rule” is probably the first word that pops into your mind. Certainly the traditional view of grammar is that it’s about the “rules of language”. Indeed, not so long ago, teaching a language meant just teaching grammatical rules, plus perhaps a few vocabulary lists. However, I’m going to suggest that there’s actually no such thing as a grammatical rule.

    To show you what I mean, let’s take the comparative of adjectives: “bigger”, “smaller”, “more useful”, “more interesting”, etc. We might start with a simple rule: for adjectives with one syllable, add -er, and for adjectives with two or more syllables, use more + adjective.

    But this doesn’t quite work: yes, we say “more useful”, but we also say “cleverer”, and “prettier”. OK then, suppose we modify the rule. Let’s also say that for two-syllable adjectives ending in -y or -er you add -er.

    Unfortunately, this doesn’t quite work either: we do say “cleverer”, but we also say “more sober” and “more proper”. And there are problems with some of the one-syllable adjectives too: we say “more real” and “more whole” rather than “realer” or “wholer”. If we modify the rule to fit these exceptions, it will be half a page long, and anyway, if we keep looking we’ll find yet more exceptions. This happens repeatedly in English grammar. Very often, rules seem so full of exceptions that they’re just not all that helpful.

    And there’s another big problem with the “rule approach”: it doesn’t tell you what the structure is actually used for, even with something as obvious as the comparative of adjectives. You might assume that it’s used for comparing things: “My house is smaller than Mary’s”; “John is more attractive than Stephen”. But look at this: “The harder you work, the more money you make.” Or this: “London is getting more and more crowded.” Both sentences use comparative adjectives, but they’re not directly comparing two things.

    What we’re actually looking at here is not a rule but several overlapping patterns, or paradigms to use the correct technical term:

    1. adjective + -er + than
    2. more + adjective + than
    3. parallel comparative adjectives: the + comparative adjective 1 … the + comparative adjective 2
    4. repeated comparative adjective: adjective + -er + and + adjective + -er/more and more + adjective

    This picture is more accurate, but it looks abstract and technical. It’s a long way from what we actually teach these days and the way we teach it, which tends to be organized around learning objectives and measurable outcomes, such as: “By the end of this lesson (or module) my students should be able to compare their own possessions with someone else’s possessions”. So we’re not teaching our students to memorize a rule or even to manipulate a pattern; we’re teaching them to actually do something in the real world. And, of course, we’re teaching it at a level appropriate for the student’s level.

    So, to come back to grammar, once we’ve established our overall lesson or module objective, here are some of the things we’re going to need to know.

    • What grammatical forms (patterns) can be used to express this objective?
    • Which ones are appropriate for the level of my students? Are there some that they should already know, or should I teach them in this lesson?
    • What do the forms look like in practice? What would be some good examples?

    Existing grammar textbooks generally don’t provide all this information; in particular, they’re very vague about level. Often they don’t even put grammar structures into specific CEFR levels but into a range, e.g. A1/A2 or A2/B1, and none fully integrates grammar with overall learning objectives.

    At app, we’ve set ourselves the goal of addressing these issues by developing a new type of grammar resource for English teachers and learners that:

    • Is based on the Global Scale of English with its precise gradation of developing learner proficiency
    • Is built on the Council of Europe language syllabuses, linking grammar to CEFR level and to language functions
    • Uses international teams of language experts to review the structures and assess their levels

    We include grammar in the GSE Teacher Toolkit, and you can use it to:

    • Search for grammar structures either by GSE or CEFR level
    • Search for grammar structures by keyword or grammatical category/part of speech
    • Find out at which level a given grammar structure should be taught
    • Find out which grammar structures support a given learning objective
    • Find out which learning objectives are related to a given grammar structure
    • Get examples for any given grammar structure
    • Get free teaching materials for many of the grammar structures

    Think of it as an open-access resource for anyone teaching English and designing a curriculum.