#creative kids

This June I visited Shibaura House in Tokyo and held a workshop for kids together with my friend and workshop partner Yumika Takeda. 

During the workshop we encouraged kids to create a character and think about his/her story. Everyone has something that makes her/him different from others: Is it his colour? His shape? Is it his personality or his story?

Round and calm shapes and soft colours could help us building soft, kind or shy character and shapes like squares, triangles or zigzags and popping or deep dark colours can make a character look fast, brave, funny, loud or naughty or even evil. Of course there are exceptions because we don’t always look the same on the outside as we are inside. 

We made lots of shapes in all kinds of colours and sizes and let kids play with them. All kids made at least one character and bigger kids even wrote down their stories. Here is one of the stories I remember:

Mr. Stocko is thinking of a watermelon and a pizza. There is a restaurant nearby but on the way to the restaurant he meets a snake. He doesn’t like reptiles! But he is very hungry too… (what an intriguing story with an open end..!)

Other stories were funny, weird and inventive too. Here are some more photos to prove it. 

Thanks to the lovely people from Shibaura house for organising it!