Birth to three matters - Communities and Local Government

exploratory and affective nature ofchildren in determining their play spacesand contexts is, by definition,creative. If,as Robinson claims, ‘creative processesare rooted in imaginative thought,in envisaging new possibilities…withoutcomes in the public world’ (Robinson2001: 115) then the child ranging throughkitchen cupboards and using saucepansand kitchen utensils as percussioninstruments is engaging in creative acts.‘Where there are high qualityopportunities for babies and toddlers tocreate and imagine…the key person isattentive to a child’s creative explorations,providing assistance in a way that doesnot disrupt the child’s flow of thinking andthrough their unobtrusive support givesthe child the emotional security toexperiment.’ (Manning-Morton and Thorp2001:section 7: 3).Although,most frequently, creativity isseen in childhood as taking part in acooperative and co-constructed world(Meek 1985, Dyson 2001),the very youngchild can be regarded as being creativewhen engaging in a monologue whilepushing a toy train,or while simplydigging sand. Similarly, Weir’s pre-sleepmonologues, the noise production of asingle child exploring clanking resourcesor a song or rhyme constructed playingwith sounds or words are examples ofchildren’s creativity. Anna Craft maintainsthat ‘creativity is dispositional and not amatter of ability…choosing a creative pathin any given situation is less a matter ofability to do so and more about “mind set”or attitude’ (Craft 2000: 107) and, withoutthe constraints perceived or collected aschildren grow and mingle in criticalgroups, young children in emotionally safecontexts are able to follow an exploratoryand risk taking mind set.Of course, as Chambers reminds us, it is ‘inliterature that we find the best expressionof the human imagination and the mostuseful means by which we come to gripswith ideas about ourselves and what weare’ (Chambers 1993: 16) and childrenneed, not only to construct andreconstruct their lived lives in playfulcontexts, but also to find their livesmirrored or referenced in the textsencountered in their early years, althoughthere are still very few story books whichinclude young children with disabilities ascentral, powerful characters.There has been much celebration ofMaurice Sendak’s (1970) story of Where theWild Things Are (Meek 1998) simply for thisreason;children are able to find their ownrelationships and temperament in Max aswell as their own sense of safety and wellbeing in the delicious closure to the tale,back in his very own room. Such texts arereassuring but also risky and challengingand they dare to play with safe contextsand upend them, exactly as children dothrough play and role play.Robinson believes that ‘the relationshipbetween knowing and feeling is at theheart of the creative process’ (2001:137)which brings together the investigative,information gathering explorations of95