“Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.” — Mary Lou Cook
Creativity can be messy! Last week we took an afternoon to make some cookies for a geography project. Scroll down and follow our messy process…
Once the dough was made each child had to flatten their dough. We only had one rolling pin so they also used their hands.
He needed flour!
Attention to detail, carefully making star shapes.
At this point flour is all over the table and I’ve had to refill the cup of flour because we still had incidents where the dough was too sticky.
Flour didn’t just remain on the table.
The kids helped brush off the flour mess and I wiped down the table. We were doing something new with cookies that day. Instead of sugar cookies with frosting, we are dipping the top of the cookie into melted chocolate.
Several short breaks to lick fingers and wash hands were part of the deal.
Carefully tracing the cookies with a contrasting color of chocolate.
Here is our finished product! If you look carefully you will see a couple of smiley faces on some of the cookies. They were yummy, but look at the next picture to see what they were supposed to look like…
It was a big mess and realistically I should have chosen another day. I had to work that day and we were going out of town the next day. I ended up finishing clean-up late at night. That was a few days ago now and that mess that enveloped my kitchen is long gone, but the memory of the time together and the opportunity my kids had to be creative remains. Oh, we have a huge stash of cookies too. Sometimes it is a little more work, but there is something about the creative process that I love. Our cookies didn’t really come close to looking like the original, but to that I quote:
“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.” — Joseph Chilton Pierce
