It's exciting to see budding creativity in our children as they grow. They won't always express it in the same ways we do - they may be painters, or piano players, or dancers, or writers, or if we're lucky, scrapbookers! I want to do all I can to encourage and build that creative side in my own children and to let them experience as many different mediums as possible. I'm sure that I don't have it all figured out but there are a few very deliberate steps I take to giving my children opportunities in these areas. I think that children need a place to put down their ideas and record them so I routinely make my children journals and art books of plain white paper for them to doodle or write in and then I wait to see what they'll come up with. Also, children, as with anybody else, love praise on their work. I celebrate my kids' work by putting it up on my fridge, showing it to friends, framing it, etc. Often I'll scrapbook what they've created along with a picture of them at that age. This is a great record of their various stages of life and also it makes them feel very important.



This particular time, my daughter came to me with a story she'd written, complete with illustrations. I used a photocopier to shrink the pages down to a more manageable size and laid it out like a story board across this double-page layout.

Mica's story reads: "Once upon a time there was a little girl and a little boy. They lived in California in the fifth house. They liked to make seashell necklaces. One day when they were looking for seashells, they found a crab shell with a crab in it. And they ran away."