Creativity Building

Here's a little exercise we like to do called "30 Circles." Given a sheet of 30 blank circles, we first filled in as many circles as we could in one minute. Later, we did it again, thinking of as many different ways we could use the circles as possible, with unlimited time to work. Here are just a few examples of the kids' ideas. I loved some of the detail in drawings made with individual circles (check out the row of pencil-drawn characters in the 5th photo, below), as well as the fact that many students automatically thought "outside the box" to make several circles into one element, like a traffic light or snowman. Some circles encompassed a complete little story (a shark fin in some waves, a sunny day), some played on the circle theme (an earth, a yin-yang, a spider web), while some just explored design and color. Neat! We'll continue to use these in many different ways in the future.