Cressida Cowell on how to nurture children’s creativity
The new Children’s Laureate, Cressida Cowell, wants more youngsters to unleash their ‘magical’ powers
When my daughter Maisie was about five, and had just started school, she invited a friend over for a play date. This tiny little girl called Ella rushed into our house, took a swift look around the room, and then ran over to the sideboard, where there stood a couple of blue candlesticks. Ella lifted one candlestick over her head, and in a very high squeaky little voice shouted: “THE CANDLESTICKS OF POWER!” Maisie did not hesitate. She did not ask any awkward questions, such as, “what on earth are you talking about?” She rushed over, and picked up the other candlestick and shouted back at her: “THE CANDLESTICKS OF POWER!” And they were off for the next three
hours, running around the house, shooting spells and making up some elaborate, fascinating magical game with the candlesticks of power.
To children, every ordinary household object has the potential to be magic. Why not? One of the great joys of being young is that you do not know the rules yet, and so you can make them up. Why can’t candlesticks move, and spoons fly? What if they could?
The small girl who closes her eyes and thinks that because she can’t see you, you can’t see her, in her own mind has the power to make herself invisible. The child who tries to jump off a box, holding an umbrella, in their own mind is not subject to the laws of gravity. A child can say, in the joyous power of the moment: “Watch me jump over the whole world!” – and mean it.
It ought to be easy to encourage magic in children because children are natural magicians. So how can we encourage children’s natural creativity? The first way is by encouraging them to read.
Magic is creating something out of nothing. It’s creativity in action. And this is what is happening every time a child reads a book, or a poem. Without them realising it, new pathways are being forged in their brains as they struggle to make sense of it. Words are POWER. The more words you give kids, the more interesting and intelligent the thoughts they can have.
Books are transformative magic because of their unique ability to develop three key magical powers: intelligence, creativity and empathy. Books are wonderful at developing empathy because, while things on a screen happen “out there”, in a book they are happening inside your head.
I receive a lot of letters and emails from parents and grandparents who say that the child in their life used to enjoy writing and drawing, but has now become so concerned that their handwriting should be neat, that they should be using “wow” words, and the correct grammatical structures, that they no longer want to put pencil to paper at all.
I remember myself, aged six, having a dispiriting struggle to control my pencil at school, how it appeared to wander off with a mind of its own making a horrible scrawly mess. I was deeply envious of another child in the class, whose beautiful neat handwriting and double underlining of “What I Did in the Holidays” earned her constant praise from the teachers, and I assumed that this meant that she was going to be the writer one day, and double underlining was going to be very important to authorship.
Until Miss Mellows became my teacher in Year 3. Miss Mellows introduced special notebooks where I could write whatever I wanted, and she didn’t seem to worry that my spelling was erratic, my writing was illegible, and my stories were highly derivative, with titles such as: “The Famous Four go to Struggler’s Top”. What Miss Mellows applauded was not the quality of what I was doing, but the enthusiasm with which I was doing it.
Those notebooks do not show great evidence of promise or prowess, or unusual skill for an eightyear-old. But that isn’t really the point, because something very important was being achieved none the less. I was enjoying myself, and there is a wealth of research to show that children who enjoy writing do better academically in the end.
And I was also, even then, writing about Vikings and dragons, and these eventually became the How to Train Your Dragon book and film series. I still keep notebooks now – for my most recent series, The Wizards of Once, I kept a big A3 scrapbook for five years, which I filled with poems, drawings and inspiration.
So with my own notebooks in mind, I launched a campaign with the National Literacy Trust last year, called “Free Writing Friday”, which provides a space at school for children to develop their creative intelligence and their pure enjoyment of writing. Each Friday, children are allocated just 15 minutes to draw or write in their books, no rules, no marking, just fun. In this one notebook, spelling, grammar and neatness should be completely irrelevant – what’s important should be the ideas. The feedback from teachers and children has been overwhelmingly positive.
Britain needs creative kids. The creative industries make £101.5billion a year for this country and are growing twice as fast as the rest of the economy. But the benefits of supporting children’s creative intelligence goes beyond the creative subjects and the creative industries, into science, entrepreneurship, medicine, every other discipline. We need the children of the future to be, if anything, more creative than people have been in the past. The world faces a lot of problems, and to quote Einstein: “No problem can be solved with the same way of thinking that created it.”
Luckily, children are natural magicians. All they need is to borrow or own a large supply of books, a notebook and a pencil. And everyone needs a space in their lives where there are no rules, and there is no marking, just fun. Let the magic begin…
Everyone needs a space in their lives where there are no rules, no marking, just fun