[MUSIC] A tough challenge that I was faced with was in the beginning of the school year, when we have 30 kids that are all new to each other and new to the school, we wanna somehow do some team building. But school and schedules and things don't always allow for that. So that was the challenge, to try to come up with some team building. Well a great thing about Elmwood Franklin is that we have a lot of creative license here in the things that we we want to do. And so, one day I was walking down the hall, and saw that there were all kinds of new chairs that were being delivered to the upper school. And each chair came in its own humongous box, and so they were piling up all the boxes in the halls, and I knew right away that we needed those boxes in prep. I didn't know what we were going to do with them yet, but I knew that the boxes could help us in some way with getting all the children together to work on a project. Well, we use the approach at Elmwood Franklin with the young children, which is a philosophy where the children are the ones that come up with the ideas themselves. We don't dictate to them the kinds of projects that they want to work on. We do reading, we do math, they're getting their academics all morning long. Then in the afternoon, it's their time. And so by using that philosophy, the children get to come up with their own ideas, they're inspired by their own ideas. And we're here to foster what they're doing, any way we can. We'll give them the materials that they want, we'll give them the time that they need. We'll give them the space, whether we're here in the atelier or whether we're in the classroom. They get to choose what they want to do, so they're very inspired. And they'll work at their own pace for however long it takes to finish their own product. The school will support us in whatever creative endeavors we would like to be taking on. There's a fund that we can make use of if we want to do a summer experience where we want to learn about something new and then bring that back to our classroom this year. That's been available to us for years. And also, if we go to our administration and say I'd really like to pursue this with the children, they have this really great idea. We need a field trip. We need these materials. Then we can access that, they're very supportive of us. In the beginning, the kids had all different kinds of ideas what they wanted to turn them into. And we had, just due to space limitations, we had about six or seven of these huge, like four by four boxes. And, but there were 30 children, and so we didn't want it to turn into a situation where they were going to be arguing. We wanted it to be a positive experience. So we figured the best thing to do in the beginning was to let them just start decorating them, painting them, kinda get a feel for how big they are. And then as conversation went forward with them, they then started to unite on the kinds of things they wanted to turn them into. But it was a problem in the beginning because with these enormous boxes, we only have one room that has linoleum. So we ended taking all the boxes outside and all the children and put the boxes all over the grass, and just let them have at it. And they went home covered in paint that day. But it was such a positive experience because every child, the shy ones, the more active ones. They were all working together on a common theme, which was let's get these boxes painted. So as they worked, and as you know, I think, I'm this way. If you put an activity in front of me and I can just sort of do my own thing and paint, and, you get lots of interesting conversation that way. As opposed to sitting down first and deciding what we're going to do. We give them an activity to spur the conversation, and then the ideas grew out of that. The outcome was creative, because it was the children's idea of what they wanted to do. We provided the materials, but they came up with their own outcome. Their outcome was, it's a helicopter, it's a house, it's a boat, it's a whatever. Our outcome was we've created teamwork. We've created some bonding. We created a team of children organically, just over cardboard boxes. If I had three wishes to grant to increase people's creativity, it would be people being less judgmental about other people's ideas, people having less inhibition with themselves and their own creative outcomes. And then I think people not being so concerned about the product, and just enjoying the process. And not be quite so, product driven. [MUSIC]