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Mud pie creating is developing creativity through imagination and play. The idea is to manipulate materials in order to achieve planned effect or to see what else is possible. It is play based upon first hand experiences. As a child I used mud for mud pies, flowers and water for perfume or whilst in the bath mixing different bathing gels and shampoos to make interesting drinks. I was very much interested in combining different mixes to see what could be created.

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Card making/picture drawing Besiana Pollozhani

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Card making/picture drawing Besiana Pollozhani

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In Elsie Marley’s website, the first picture shows a child creating a mud pie kitchen. Dirt from the garden has been put into a large dish, and the child is mixing it. It is a form of creativity. This picture is a birthday card my 5.3-year-old daughter made for her grandma on her birthday. For creativity to flourish the child needs to be exposed to sensory stimuli, i.e. the right materials, the child needs freedom of choice, but also ground rules have to be in place.

The activity of the mud pie kitchen affects the cognitive (it gets the child thinking) the social-emotional (provides a sense of accomplishment and achievement), as well as the physical development (refinement of fine and gross motor skills) of the child.

The action schema can be observed in the website, whereas in my daughter’s example the image schema is in place.

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Laura Trowern

This is one of the girls at about 14 months. She is exploring colour and the texture of paint, and seeing how it changes. At this stage repetition was important - we could do this every day and she wanted to find out that paint changed colour every time! She could tell me that some of her pictures were things, for example "is mummy" or "is tata" (a caterpillar). She is beginning to mark make. Above all she is having fun and exploring being creative with different materials.

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In the picture, the children are using the toilet rolls to represent as telescopes. They are sitting in the box and basket respectively which they may imagine they are sitting in the home balcony or hot air balloon

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Group work - Children playing parallel with each other painting. Helen Moon

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Group work - Children playing parallel with each other painting. Helen Moon

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These children are expressing their creative side through painting. They are relaxed lying on the floor painting their own creation of the world outside. They are using
things they can see outside in the outdoor environment. The sun, butterflies and clouds are being used. They are using the Transformation schemaby mixing the colours from the pallet to the paper.

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Leanne Couchman

This little girl is transporting objects around the room using the basket. it seems to be food so maybe she has been shopping??

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This is what my 14 months old did this morning with finger painting. She sat in the middle of the white paper (it's huge - 2 meters x 2 meters almost) and I started to squeeze colors in one point. She waived her hand in a circular movement on the color and then touching herself with color and again I squeezed another color and again this amazing circular movement she did with her arm/hand.. This is the result!

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This picture shows clearly the child expressing creativly through drawing a scheema about transport, the town layout and the enviroment. We can see the water, pathway, rail and road, and the houses all in a set place in the picture. The child has used the creative output of art to express the schema and idea's around what they see and have experienced in the enviroment.

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Mud Pie In the series of pictures we see the child going through a creative process of manipulating the materials in sequence to create the finished product. This shows how creativity emerges through play oppertunities - the child takes available resourses and manipulates them physicly to create a vison of what he wants. Creativity often emerges as an expression of what the child eperiences in everyday life - this a wonderful example, we see the child imitating cooking and making pies (which we presume he has seen/experienced at home or in nursery). He takes this experience (schema)and mimics it by being creative with the available materials. We also see at the end the child has arranged the flowrs to make a beutriful creation, an extention of what he has seen in cooking made into art. 

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Mud Pie In the series of pictures we see the child going through a creative process of manipulating the materials in sequence to create the finished product. This shows how creativity emerges through play oppertunities - the child takes available resourses and manipulates them physicly to create a vison of what he wants. Creativity often emerges as an expression of what the child eperiences in everyday life - this a wonderful example, we see the child imitating cooking and making pies (which we presume he has seen/experienced at home or in nursery). He takes this experience (schema)and mimics it by being creative with the available materials. We also see at the end the child has arranged the flowrs to make a beutriful creation, an extention of what he has seen in cooking made into art. 

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In the series of pictures we see the child going through a creative process of manipulating the materials in sequence to create the finished product. This shows how creativity emerges through play oppertunities - the child takes available resourses and manipulates them physicly to create a vison of what he wants. Creativity often emerges as an expression of what the child eperiences in everyday life - this a wonderful example, we see the child imitating cooking and making pies (which we presume he has seen/experienced at home or in nursery). He takes this experience and mimics it by being creative with the available materials. We also see at the end the child has arranged the flowrs to make a beutriful creation, an extention of what he has seen in cooking made into art.

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Shiuny Peretti

I took this picture because I was very impressed by my nephew's (2 1/2 yrs) art work. It was a rainy day and we could not go out. So my sister and I took all the colours we had and prepared a table so the children could do some colouring. We left the kids after some time to go and prepare a snack and when we came back my nephew had created this wonderful piece of art using all the different colours she could get hold of and spending a lot of time to position her colours inside the frame so that it looks harmonious.

This work can be related to Athey's (1990) schema of 'positioning' as in this case my nephew is focusing on lining up all her coloured crayons and pencil colours in a particular way and encircling it around a frame.

She is also discovering what she can do with her colours and using her imagination to create a new kind of art work. This can be related to Hutt et al. (1989) epistemic play.

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I had lots of old off-cuts of rolls of wrapping paper and parcel paper that I put with my son's things, thinking he could use them for drawing or whatever he wanted. He looked at the rolls for a long time (thinking / planning?) and then 'went for it'! Rounding up his materials: markers and tape and bringing everything into the bathroom where he could use the mirror to make what he described as "a tall hat with an empty ceiling", like a big roll, taped to size. Then, big cuffs with marks that could be pressed to 'poison the baddies'. Drawing, indeed! Like the Elsie Marley blog photos, there is resourcefulness happening (use what you have) and reconstruction (he was making a costume to enhance super-hero play that he'd started earlier with his friends over the weekend and then with some toys earlier today). As always, when left to his own devices he came up with a much bigger plan.

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Marcela Kiely

I enjoyed watching this youtube clip. I feel hesitant posting it, because there are so many things relating to it that are up for discussion. What is relevant to this task is, how children use simple and found objects, or in some cases their bodies and voices creatively, to play or try or practice something.

I saw children co-operating and taking turns. I saw curiosity and wanting to explore. There was evidence of creative thinking, in re-purposing objects and using them for play and other purposes. I saw trajectory being explored.

The part where an adult whistles, and the children perform movements in response, I did not find particularly creative or joyful, but perhaps I am biased.

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Very creative kids in Africa! (Gaming outside the West)

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Playing with corks/Julia Laborra Fagoaga

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Playing with corks/Julia Laborra Fagoaga

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One morning, the practitioner of my children brought a huge amount of corks to the classroom. She said the children spent more than one hour exploring different posibilities with them. They touched them and moved them around in the boxes they were kept, they spread them in the floor and lay down on top of them sliding on the floor, they jumped using them as obstacles, they lined them up, they made circles with them, they created a maze... she left them time to explore and just watched them do, like in a Montessori setting. I thought it was amazing how much they had done with such a simple thing as a cork. That´s why I have choosen this picture:

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Creativity as diverting objects [AdelineLucchesi

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Creativity as diverting objects [AdelineLucchesi

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This child's work might appear creative as it diverts pegs (which function is often to help hold the washing) which are now more a decoration like accessories on her dress. Lots of children use the function of the tools they discover (once the "epistemic stage" passed)in a novel context and with another purpose ("ludic stage") (Hutt et al., 1989 in MCI, 2013, Child Development Module). It might show a recurrent interest (or schema) for grasping/pinching/gripping.

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This is a game I loved to do when I was a baby. I was able to "cook" everywhere taking mud from every piece of land. I remember that my grandmother greatly encouraged this thing I liked to do, giving to me small pots and utensils to put the mud in and to prepare it properly... She was also happy to "try" my creations and to discuss about them with me. Today I can say that I can cook pretty well and I greatly enjoy doing it, also in a creative way! Thanks Grandma! )Ottavia(

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