Rachel Heck - Play-Doh and Creativity

"Researchers say creativity should be taken out of the art room and put into homeroom" (The Creativity Crisis). If education administrators were to decrease the amount of emphasis they put on "standardizing" all of their students and focus more on implementing this excellent suggestion researchers have made, the apparent decline in creativity of students/children in the United States would soon begin to reverse. Although students have an extensive amount of information they must learn in elementary school and beyond, the method by which they attain the knowledge and skills is by no means confined to simply listening to teacher lectures and taking tests over the material. One way creativity could be effectively intertwined within the established curriculum is with the use of Play-Doh to accomplish some tasks or solve some problems. Play-Doh could be used for simple math such as creating unique creatures to use as pieces for visually learning addition and subtraction, or it could be used for more complex learning topics such as creating a prototype, and thus an advertising scheme, for a new tool or machine to help solve a current health or environmental issue.