Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion I think I have a highly imaginative child...ideas?

I am looking to see if anyone has some ideas on the best way to deal with a highly imaginative child. It is the first time I am dealing with this.

My first child DS4 has always been a very analytical child. Although very creative now (he is writing a "novel" as we speak), he had a different approach to things than my second child DS27 mo. So that you know, both kids learned their upper lower case letters, sounds of all the letters, counting to 30, counting to 10 in Spanish and Swedish, all the shapes and colors by about 2 years old.

But this is an example of the difference in them. The other night DS27 mo and I were looking at a picture in the Preschool workbook he loves to work with. It was a picture of a slide, a turtle at the bottom of the slide a dog at the top and a mouse sitting on the ground to the side of the slide. There was also the word D-O-G written on the page. I pointed to the letters and asked what it said. DS4 would always look at the letters OR numbers and let me know what they were and then move on. DS27mo on the other hand, ignored my question sat quiet for a while and then said "Mama, maybe the dog slide down and bump the turtle and turtle fall down and get a booboo and need a band aid. And mouse climb up the ladder and slide down and bump the dog"

There is NEVER a time when he won't make up a story about a picture he sees. THAT is his focus, although most of the time when done with his little story he will point out the letters/numbers or whatever is on the page.

I guess I am just a bit thrown off by this imagination of his, and I am so used to helping the way DS4 wanted things done (getting quizzed). DS27mo wants nothing to do with getting quizzed. He ignores me most of the time...:-)

To all of you with imaginative kids (That IS what I am dealing with right?) how do you stimulate your child's intense drive to create?

Also want to point out that he is EXTREMELY sensitive, a lot more so that DS4. He will not let me read certain passages in books that he finds disturbing in anyway. I am assuming the sensitivities is connected to the creativity?

I just really want to nurture this imaginative side of him since that seems to be who he is. So any tips are appreciated.

Thanks! Annie

My four year old is very creative and also hates being quizzed. For example, in preschool they introduced the solar system. After the first day or so he would refuse to name the planets if asked. However, I would over hear him talking to his snowman beanie baby about them. "Baby Snowman, I am going to take you on a rocket to Pluto. It is the furthest planet and it is very cold. You won't have to worry about melting. Some people say Pluto and Ceres and Eris are dwarf planets because they are small and don't follow the rules the other planets follow. I think that is mean. I am small and I don't like to follow rules too but I am still a boy not a dwarf boy. We'll have to avoid the asteroids in the asteroid belt and make sure we stay away from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune but I made a map (drawing of solar system) so it should be easy". An hour later if asked where Pluto was he'd reply "I don't know"

One activity he really enjoys is easy and cheap. Get used magazines and catalouges and help him cut out pictures of things he thinks are cool. Get a cardboard box and fill it up with the cutouts. We once had thousands collected by several family members. Get him to randomly reach in and pick some out (10,20, whatever) and tell a story about those pictures. The results are always interesting. He also likes to make videos of his stories to look at later.

At that age and for a bit longer, kids vacillate between make-believe and reality quite a bit. I had a very active imagination as a kid, and my mom says I made up stories and that she sometimes had to do some explaining to neighbors who'd been on the listening end of some of my tall tales. I knew I was adopted, so the stories I made up about how I'd come to be adopted could probably rival Harry Potter's arrival in this world...

With my own kids, I had fun with their creativity. In your specific case, I would have probably followed up with questions about how the dog would have reacted to getting bumped by a mouse who'd careened down a slide and then propel the story along to a fun, wild conclusion.

My older kids, now in college, tell me that our crazy stories are some of their favorite childhood memories, and I know they helped my very analytical, sensing engineer of a son explore creativity when he certainly wouldn't explore it through writing assignments.

So my advice, really, is to embrace it and nurture it at this age.

IME, it's not a question of stimulating a need to create with an imaginative/artistic/analytic child so much as it is a case of "stand back and get the heck out of the way".

Give him the raw tools to work with-- art and craft supplies, picture books, hardware and gears and wood and whatever (appropriate for development) and let him have at it.

I'd agree with eldertree, see yourself more as a facilitator than a leader. I gave up on leading my DD long ago, I just listen, think, research to try and help her on her journey.

Also, read alot of "above level", classic stories, fairy tales... Read to them, not necessarily with them (not pointing out words etc.) Just for the stories, and the old richness of the descriptions and imagination, all the possibilites.

Very interesting, thanks! I think with DS4 I actually did follow his lead although he needed and wanted more interaction from me in the form of quizzing etc.

I am probably a bit too stuck in that mode and like you said I need to just step back and follow even more. It is very obvious DS27mo wants to take charge and be in the lead. (He is like that in every aspect,really.

ABQMom, that is pretty much what I did. I asked follow up questions and I can tell how excited he gets! I think it has been in the past week or so I am finally picking up on the way he wants our interaction to be. I am excited about it and your ideas are greatly appreciated!

I could CRY I am so happy you posted this!!!!!

I have no one to ask about these things & sometimes I feel so alone. I want to support my child but at times I simply don't know how to & there's no one to ask!

My son is 7 & has created an entire fictional family for a movie & book series. He rattles off their antics & ages repeatedly. "John Doe was 15 when I was born" or "Jane Doe sent a penguin to her 83 yr old father & when that happened my sister was 4"..... After the 15th story in 5 minutes at times I want to pull out my hair.

You don't know the relief I found in reading your words. I will now go read the answers but first I just wanted to THANK YOU.

1111 - it sounds like your kids are both quite gifted but in different ways (one more linear, so to speak, and one with a more imaginative, curvy path) You're going to be so busy!!

My younger sibling and I lived in our games so much. I can still remember so many of the character's names and where they lived and their family structure. Sometimes the ideas started from a book and took off on a divergent path, sometimes they were just completely original. My older sibling was not so much but she'd pop out of her books and into our game every once in a while to offer a detail or two, or more advanced vocabulary.

My DS4 constantly invents videos about an imaginary place and everything that lives there, both imaginary and real creatures. It's so ingrained for him that he talks about it as if it's real to strangers, though if you ask him straight out he'd say it was pretend. You can't ask him to get to a stopping place, you have to ask him to "pause". Sometimes he's a character also, but usually he's just the narrator. DH does a better job than I do of immersing into the world, I have trouble keeping all the facts of it straight... I want to care, I enjoy hearing all the storylines, but to actually participate more than a few minutes I find hard -- maybe I'm just not that imaginative.

Polly

Perhaps it's a situation like my own and my DD's, which I recently described to my wife thusly: "It's like I have the user's manual to her brain." DW is also gifted (which she denies), but her brain functions in a different way.