Banish Boredom with these Creative Exercises

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Hey friend, and welcome back to another episode of Artworks for Teachers. I’m your host, Susan Riley. And today I’m gonna walk you through four exercises to use with the four branches of creativity. Now, if you don’t know what I’m talking about with the four branches of creativity, I want you to go back a couple of episodes where I talked about this whole topic of the four branches of creativity. It comes from my upcoming book where I’m gonna be talking all about this whole idea of creativity and education and unleashing this untapped potential in the education environment and this idea that we haven’t really talked about before about how creativity really branches off into these four components. And just as a quick recap for those of you who maybe have missed that episode or need a quick reminder.

In the past, we’ve kind of had this generalized idea that creativity is this kind of big nebulous thing that we all either have or maybe we’re not good at or that there’s just creative geniuses out there. And sometimes those of us who are creative or who have been deemed as creative, right, even though really we’re all creative, but those of us who have pursued the arts in some specific way,

Sometimes the arts have pitted against themselves. For example, sometimes there’s an argument between arts educators and those who are advocates for arts integration, like myself. Even though I myself am an arts educator, sometimes there’s an argument from other arts educators that arts integration is diluting arts education, or it’s taking away from arts education classes because…

There’s a fear that arts integration will be used instead of arts classes or that arts teachers will be cut from from schools because arts integration will be used and it will dilute the programs. Right? There’s this whole argument for that. But what that fails to recognize is that there’s actually these four branches of creativity and that creativity exists between these four branches and among them, right? So that there’s individual branches among between them and that they all work together so that each of these branches exists alone so that there’s arts skills and arts integration as well as arts thinking, right? And then also arts expression or arts appreciation, all of these branches, but they also all work together. They all depend upon one another.

So it doesn’t really do us any good to argue one over the other because they all really work together, right? And so when we’re thinking about these four branches and how each of them acts really as an access point for all of us, that we can embrace creativity through each of these branches, then we have to think about, well, how do we do that? And that is what today’s episode is for.

So I know I didn’t spend a ton of time in that previous episode going really deep into these four branches. And that’s really because that’s what the book is going to be for, right? But I did want to give you some really practical applications for each of those branches so that you can begin to explore each of those branches for yourself. Because you know, I’m a big advocate on this program for us as educators.

exploring these things ourselves first so that we can become comfortable in each of these areas so that we can bring them to our students. Because I’m going to be truthful and I’ve always said this, our students can sniff it out when we’re not comfortable and if we’re not willing to at least try it with them, they’re not going to be willing to try it with us.

Right? So that’s why I’m always such a big advocate that we at least try it ourselves first before bringing it into our classrooms. Because if we’re going to bring it in and be like, hey, I can’t even draw a stick figure, but I want you to do this, students are not going to be willing to do it with us, especially at the upper levels, right? Middle and high school. So and that’s not fair. That’s not fair to you. And that doesn’t empower you as an educator to make statements like that. And it’s certainly not fair to our students. So.

This gives you an ability, today’s episode is going to give you an ability to explore each of these branches for yourself and then bring that into your classroom and give your students that same ability. So each of these four branches are going to give you one activity for each of these branches. Now, that being said, I know that some of us don’t consider ourselves to be artists in a normalized, I’ll say, way in terms of what generally people would say an artist would be, a musician or a visual artist in a specific medium. But I want you to consider yourself an artist in your own right, in one of the areas that you most enjoy. Just kind of wear that hat for yourself in this in each of these branches just for now. Just try it on. Nobody’s gonna see it, right? It’s just you.

And this is just for yourself to experiment and explore. So don’t worry about anybody judging you. It’s not for anybody else. It’s just for yourself to practice and to explore. And who knows, you may end up surprising yourself, right? You could end up being like George Bush who never knew that he was a watercolorist at heart. So let’s dive in. So as I said, there are four branches of creativity, right? And just as a reminder, the four branches are creative skills,

And so that would be like dedicated visual arts skills, music skills, dance skills, theater skills, creative thinking. So that’s when we’re thinking about things maybe outside of the box, we’re thinking about design, we’re thinking about how to creatively solve a problem, things like that. Creative expression and creative appreciation, artful appreciation is going to fall into this branch of creative expression both of those creative appreciation and expression fall under this umbrella where you’re creating a space for being able to be safe, being able to express yourself, being able to explore how you feel within an area as you’re looking at a feeling, experiencing a work of art, whether that be a dance, a piece of music listening to Beyonce’s latest album, looking at a piece of artwork at a gallery, watching a play that you’ve gone to see on Broadway, who knows? All of those experiences are part of the creative expression branch of the four branches. And then creative application. And that’s where things like arts integration, STEAM, project -based learning, that’s where all of that lives. Okay? So…

There are lots of different ways that you could experience each of these four branches. Today, I’m going to give you one idea in each of the branches so that you can go ahead and try them out for yourselves. I’ve picked an idea for each branch that is fairly broad because, again, we have a lot of different kinds of backgrounds and people who listen to this podcast, people who are dedicated artists in their own right, and people who are general educators who have no artistic background whatsoever and who are just lovers of the arts and creative experiences and want to bring this into their classrooms. And so I want to make this as easy to experience as possible and take as deep as you want to take it. Okay? So keep that in mind as I’m sharing each of these with you today. So we’re going to start with creative skills. So remember, this is picking an art form that you want to dive into your own creative skills. So if you are an artist, if you already have an art form that you are working in as a medium, if you are a visual artist, maybe your specific medium is clay. For me as a musician, my medium is voice. That’s my first medium. My second medium would be piano, right? If you are not a dedicated artist,

I want you to pick the medium that you are most comfortable in and that you would, maybe you had some experience in school. So if you were in choir or if you went to art class and you really enjoyed working in watercolor or if you really enjoyed working with, you know, even if you just remember going to elementary school and you worked with tempera paint or crayons, I don’t care what medium it is. If you worked in, if you happened to go, to high school theater and you loved working in theater, right? You remember at some point doing a warm -up, right? So at some point, I hope that everybody who’s listening here had some sort of artistic skill -based warm -up, right? And so if you were in a high school choir, I’m sure that you had a warm -up that your high school choir director made you do that’s hopefully stuck in your head at some point.

If you worked in a visual art class that you had a warm -up, a drawing warm -up that you maybe worked on. If you had a dance instructor you worked with a movement warm -up. I want you to think of that warm -up, okay? And I want you to think about why do we do warm -ups as for art skills, right? Why do we do that? Even professional musicians, we’re still doing a warm -up. And all musicians or all artists, all dancers, all theater folks are always, we’re always doing warm -ups before we ever perform, right? Or ever put out, start working on our next piece. It’s because we want to make sure that there’s that routine, right? Our bodies get into that routine, our minds start getting into that routine. That first starting point really needs a moment to begin warming up, right?

So as we’re working in creative skills, I want you to start with the warmup. And I think this is one of the easiest places to begin because almost everyone has had an experience with a warmup of some sort. I want you to think about practicing a warmup in whatever arts area you choose, but I want you to limit them in some way. This is called constrain yourself. Okay, I want you to limit your normal warmup, whatever that warmup had been.

I want you to limit it in some way and you can limit them in a lot of different ways. You could try limiting it by time. So you could limit your warm up to maybe a minute or 30 seconds. You could limit it by space. So if you’re a visual artist and you’re used to warming up by drawing all over a large piece of paper, maybe you limit that to a one inch by one inch square. Maybe you’re limiting it by speed.

So if you are a musician who’s used to working on scales as your warmup, maybe you’re gonna limit that by working on only working it at a speed of 60 beats a minute. Okay, so that’s fairly slow instead of very quickly. Maybe you’re gonna limit it by style. So you can only use long strokes instead of short and long strokes when you’re drawing on your paper, or you can only use short movements when you’re working on your movement warm -up instead of both long and short movements, right? So there’s lots of different ways that you could constrain your normal warm -up, but I want you to think about, okay, if I were to practice this arts skill, how could I constrain it in some way? Okay, what would be the easiest way? Sometimes the easiest way is just time.

For me as a musician when I’m warming up if I’m working on scales a good warm -up for me is gonna be good five ten minute warm -up if I’m gonna do a constraint a One minute warm -up is gonna be really short for me, right? But working on how can I get a good warm -up in in one minute that takes a lot of creativity to think about Okay, what elements of my warm -up could I bring in to make it really work? Well for me in a minute. How could I do that, that’s gonna take some creative thought. Same for any kind of visual artist. How can I get the same kind of warmup that I would normally do in a large space into a one by one square? How can I, as a dancer, get that same kind of warmup that I would take for all of the kinds of movements that I want and get it into just using short movements instead? Right?

How can I be creative in how I think about my warm -up routine, my normal warm -up routine, and by these constraints? By constraining ourselves, our mind automatically has to start to think differently. And I love this because, first of all, it helps when we’re working in skill -based components with the arts. But also, this can apply to so many other things that are also skill -based.

So, and I can’t help it, my arts integration brain starts working in overdrive. Think about all the other skills that we work on, math skills, reading skills, science skills, all of the other skills that we’re working on in everything that we do, that if we were to constrain them in some way, we’d have to get creative at thinking about, okay, how would I overcome that constraint and still get to that same, that same solution that I need to get to, right? So I love that just that whole idea of constraint because constraint automatically leads to creativity. So that’s the first part. So for creative skills, a great exercise to work on creative skills is called constrain yourself. Just limit your warmup in that creative skill set by some way. Some examples are time, space, speed or style. All right.

Let’s move on to the second branch. Second branch is creative thinking. Now, there are so many different warm -ups, ways that you can express creative thinking. There are books upon books upon books dedicated to just creative thinking routines. Okay? So I can’t give you all of the creative thinking routines that are out there. That could take days. But I want to give you one that I think is fast, effective, and could be used almost anywhere. It’s called the one by five strategy. And for me, this is why I really like it because you could use this not just in school, you could use this for almost anything. You could use it around the house. You could use this for prototyping a design. You could use it for project how tos, idea brainstorming, creating a musical or a dance or a visual art composition, reworking piece of writing that you’re working on, exploring a math problem, considering an alternate ending to a historical event, like what would happen if, right? There are so many different ways that you could use this particular strategy that it’s not dedicated to just one particular kind of thinking routine. It’s really versatile, which is why I wanted to share it. So if you’re working in any kind of content area, I think this strategy works well.

So here’s how the one by five strategy works. Step one is just start by selecting a starting object, right? And you want to get students into groups of five. You can have less than five in a group, but five is ideal. So you’re gonna provide those groups of five with a starting object. And this could be anything. It could be a blank piece of paper. It could be a pan of watercolors. It could be a piece of music, whatever you want. And then step two is that the first student in the group changes just one thing about the starting object. They might change a side of a given shape or fold down one side of a piece of paper. Then step three is to rotate. So you’re going to rotate to the next person who changes one more thing about the object. And then you repeat this step a total of five times or until everybody has had a turn then step four is to reflect. So you’re going to explore how did the object change in form, structure, or components from where it started out. So if you’re working with a general idea, how did the idea change, right? So if you’re not working with an actual object, but you’re working with an idea and everybody changed something about the idea, how did that idea change from the start? So if you started with an object, how can the object now be used or not used anymore, right? And then step five is to revise and then share out. So if you’re happy with the end result of after the original set of changes, you can now share the new object or the idea. And if you’re not happy, you repeat it and revise the object until you are happy with the result. Now, you could do this alone. If you wanted to do this all by yourself, you absolutely could. You just do it five times.

You adjust an idea or an object five times and you see where you’re at and then make adjustments until you’re happy with the adjustments, until you’re happy with the new object and the new idea. The challenge is to do it five times. The reason that five works is because there’s research works in our, has told us in our brain that five is like a magic number. It allows us to stretch just enough to push our thinking beyond just an immediate three sets of changes, right? Five stretches us, but it’s not so much that we think it’s impossible to do. So that magic sweet spot of five changes is really what pushes us beyond the boundaries and allows us to try and tinker with new things. So like I said, you can adjust it to just doing it alone, but it’s really great if you can try it with multiple people, because again, those perspectives are also something really fantastic. Don’t worry if you’re driving and you don’t have something to write this down. We are going to include this in the freebie for this episode. So make sure you go to artsintegration .com forward slash artworks and look for today’s episode on the exercises for the four creative branches so that you can download today’s freebie with all of the exercises on it. Okay, so I hope that you can see how that creative thinking exercise expands how you’re thinking about something and helps you to kind of start to work out how problems could be solved. We have this phrase in our team that a problem is just a project. A problem is just a project to be solved, right? So you’re changing your thought process about it and that’s what this creative thinking routine does.

So that’s an exercise for the creative thinking branch. Now we’re gonna move into the creative expression branch. Now this is something that I want you to be really thoughtful about. Creative expression as a branch is the area where we are overcome with emotion when we’re listening to something meaningful that strikes us in some way. It’s where when we’re looking at a painting, that where we feel an emotion of some sort and we don’t know why, or perhaps we do know why, it strikes us in some way. It’s the area where we feel an emotive response to artwork. It’s also the area where we feel we can express ourselves as humans in a way that we can’t express ourselves other ways, right?

That’s where my definition of creativity is, it’s the fingerprint of humanity, right? It’s our unique fingerprint. It’s the way that we express our humanity into the world, right? That’s the creative expression branch. And so it lives in both areas, right? This is also where many times we learn how to self -regulate, how to have self -expression, how to learn, how to contain and hold the expressions of others as well. That’s why when we’re singing in a choir, often the emotions you’ll hear from choir members that as they’re singing, their expression is also coming back and being reflected to them and being held by others because there’s all of the emotions from them as well as others, and it’s all being melded and pulled together, right? There’s this very big emotive component that is a part of creative expression. That being said, this is also where art therapy lives. And so I want you to be very cautious in this area. This is a great area for social emotional learning and that area of expression to allow to that for that area to live in our classrooms. But also remember, we are not trained therapists. Unless you are listening to this and you actually are a trained arts therapist, or are a social worker, or are a trained therapist, in which case you have permission to go use this in that realm. But the rest of us, those of us who do not have that training, I want you to move through this branch with a sense of caution, just knowing that that is not our training. And so if you do see behaviors that are not yours to regulate, that are not yours to hold, to be mindful of that. Know where your boundary is as an educator and where your boundary is when you start to see the behaviors that are not yours to regulate anymore and when they need to be referred to a therapist or to a counselor so that you know where that line is and where that boundary is. I think that’s really, really important to share as a caution in this area. That being said, one area that I would like to showcase for creative expression is called the feelings wheel. Now,

When you go into the freebie, this will be a part of that download. This has circulated the web for a long time, but on the feelings wheel, what’s helpful about this is that there are a list of feelings in the wheel that you can take a look at. And oftentimes when somebody says, how do you feel about something? The list of feelings that we tend to share is like four. Happy, sad, angry, or…

Eh, like I don’t know, right? Or I’m hanging in there. But there are so many more descriptors for our feelings, right? We just don’t have access to those descriptors right off the bat. So by sharing the feelings wheel and around this wheel, there are colors that are associated with each of the feelings in the wheel. So by allowing ourselves or our students to see the wheel,

and then identify how are you feeling in this particular moment, or if you’re looking at a piece of artwork or listening to a piece of music, how does that make you feel? And then being able to select a word off of that feelings wheel, that’s a very easy and helpful way to begin to articulate and understand how our feelings are connected to a piece of art.

Now, an extension to that is by using the color that is associated with that feeling in a new or a different way that represents that feeling. So for example, if the feeling of sad is associated with the color blue, how could I use the color blue in some way that demonstrates the feeling of sad? Right? And there are so many possibilities here.

And that is a really wonderful activity. It allows for a lot of creativity, a lot of expansion. You could limit that. You could constrain that in some way. You could provide materials for that that are, you know, maybe are just using watercolor, or just using crayons, or just using, you know, whatever you have handy in some way, maybe collage. There’s lots of different opportunities there. But again, this is a great social -emotional learning opportunity for your students. It’s something short, sweet, to the point.

This comes from a toolkit called the Expressive Art Toolkit out of the University of Memphis. Again, this is going to be linked in the show notes. I highly recommend going and grabbing this because there are a list of hundreds of activities just like this in all the arts areas, music, theater, there’s movement, there’s lots of different ways that creative expression is shared in that manual and I think it’s a really wonderful resource. All right, last but not least is our fourth branch and this is for creative application. Again, this is for areas like arts integration, STEAM, PBL, and this one I’m going to give you an example called Lit Smash. Now, years ago the big term was app smashing. You remember app smashing when you used to take one app and you’d take the result of something that you did in an app on your phone and then you took another app, you took the result from the first app and you put it in the second app and that was called an app smash, right? You smash the two apps together. Well, in this case, in this particular example, I’m going to challenge you to do a lit smash, a literary smash. So I want you to think about offering students or yourself the opportunity to combine storylines of two different stories or plays or novels together to create one play or story. Okay, so think about how could you create take two stories and combine them into one as a lit smash. So for students in the case of students they would in this case write direct and perform a new play out of their lit smash. So let me give you an example.

An example of this would be to take the play, the Shakespeare play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the novel Midnight Library from Matthew Haig, and have students read both and then combine those two stories into one play. Write a new play that would combine those two storylines, which would be really, really interesting if you think about it. If you haven’t read A Midnight Library, The Midnight Library is essentially the storyline is that it’s a what if storyline. Like if you look back at your life and you have the opportunity to have different, made different choices along the way, you get to go to a library in the middle of the night and make different choices. If I made a different choice here, what would have happened? And then you get to stay there for a little while and then come back.

And then, oh, well, if I made a different choice here, what would have happened? And make it different and get to see what would have made, like, what would have life would have been like at that juncture, right? Think about a Midsummer Night’s Dream, right? The mix up that would have happened if, when Puck plays the trick on them, right? And then how everything went back to normal at the end. Well, what if things didn’t go back to normal? Or what if he had made different choices? Or what if…

And so take those two storylines, put them together, have students discuss them, put them together, write a new play, have that play be written by students, directed by students, and performed by students, and share it out with the community. Now, that would be a year -long project, obviously, right? That wouldn’t be something you’d put together in one day. But that lit -snash, that’s like an arts integration year -long project that would be instead of putting on a theater production of a Midnight Summer Night’s Dream, you would have, instead of that theater production for the year, you would have this arts integrated project that would be your theater production, but it would be fully student run. And it would be like this amazing thing that would have never been done before. That is creative application. You could do it yourself if you wanted to, I mean, if you have a creative idea that you wanna put together and run for yourself, absolutely, if that’s something that sparks your idea that’s a branch you could explore for yourself as well. So those are four exercises that you could explore in each of the branches for yourself. Now certainly you probably don’t want to do all four, but my challenge to you as we’re headed into the summer months is to maybe just pick one this summer. Is it creative skills? Do you want to try one of the that that constrain yourself exercise in the creative skills area? Do you want to try that creative thinking exercise and think about how you could maybe change an idea or a project and get yourself into a different space on that project. Do you want to explore creative expression and try that feelings wheel on something that maybe you’re thinking about or a new piece of music that you’re listening to or a piece of art that you want to take a look at? Or do you want to explore that glitz smashing idea for a new creative application for a for a play that you want to experience for next year and you want to put together for your school. Pick one of those branches and just play with it this summer. That’s what summer’s good for, right? All right, my friend, I hope that you enjoyed these exercise ideas. Remember, all of them are going to be available as a freebie over at artsintegration.com forward slash artworks. Thank you so much for tuning in today. Next week, I’ll be back with another interview, so you don’t want to miss it. Thank you so much for tuning in and have a great week.