Fostering Creativity Within the Classroom

Our greatest hope for improving creative thinking lies with children in school and the educators who step outside of the norm to unravel their students¿ creative abilities. Creativity is a valuable commodity, and creative teachers are the ones that push their students to excel which moves our civilization further. This project focuses deliberately bringing humor, magic, and Creative Problem Solving (CPS) tools into the classroom. The underlying techniques and skills for stimulating creativity within the classroom are examined and best ways to foster creativity within the educational systems are identified. The author focused on the following questions:(a) How might humor create a classroom community?(b) How might magic engage and create a positive learning environment for second grade children?(c) What benefits are there to using CPS with second grade students? In order to answer these questions information was gathered by the second grade students, dean, and the teacher in the form of various feedback forms, pictures, and logs used as part of the regular classroom experience. This was examined in light of the current literature and best practices.