The contemporary emphasis in our schools on academic excellence is silencing the natural curiosity, imagination and creativity of teachers and children. Academic learning rewards children for learning what is already known, it encourages reproductive thinking. Such thinking is important; we really don’t have to reinvent the wheel. But the over-emphasis on reproductive thinking also leads children to use what is already known as the means to deal with new and unexpected problems. While this may work, it may not be the best and/or the most effective solution. Yet education rewards such problem solving with high grades. The educational reward system, in effect, discourages curiosity, imagination and creativity, or productive thinking. And productive thinking is like a muscle if you don’t use it you lose it.

As parents there are a number of game like activities that we can play with a child (or children) in order to nourish his or her productive thinking abilities. One of these is the “Multiple Uses” game. In this game you ask the child to think of as many uses as he or she can for familiar household items like rubber bands, paper plates or sponges. This encourages the child to think beyond the familiar uses of the objects and to create new ones. A variant of the multiple uses game is the “Multiple Names” game. In this game we ask the child to make up new names for familiar objects like a chair, a tooth brush or a comb. These can be funny but they also help the child not to let names limit the way they think about the objects named.

Another game can be played after reading a book or watching a movie or a television program. You might ask the child something like, “What do you think might have happened, if they didn’t find the treasure, or they didn’t catch the thief?” This game helps children to understand that the same series of events can have different outcomes. A variant of this game is to have the child make up a story about the family pet, or about the family house or car. While the starting point might be a real event, the child needs to be challenged to go further and add his or her own made up events.

When out of doors on a nice day a challenging game is to ask the child to look up into the sky and to see if they can recognize any familiar shapes in the clouds. Because the clouds are changing this can be an ongoing game with “Oh, now it looks like a….” This and the other activities described above help the child to go beyond what is known and what is certain and to explore the possible and the imaginable.

Playing games such as these with your child will help counteract the productive thinking emphasis that has become all too common in our schools.