Creative Thinking Six -Year Old Style

 Creative thinking may mean simply the realization that there’s no particular virtue in doing things the way they always have been done  Rudolf Flesch  

 Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.  Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury sums up how my kids often solved their own problems. As part of a busy household, they often came up with their own solutions to problems before I could help them. 

This is best illustrated by one of my son’s when he was six years old. His grade one teacher recounted this story to me. It seems that she asked her class this question,

“How would you open the garage door if there were no grown-ups around?”

 All the kids in her grade one class just sat and stared blankly at her, except my son Joseph. He was frantically waving his hand in the air and then excitedly blurted out,

“You just stand on a milk crate, push on the upper left-hand corner of the garage door with a hockey stick and push hard. The door comes up a bit, you jump off the crate and crawl in!!”

Then Joseph grinned, throughly pleased with himself.