Creative Thinking Activities and Exercises

Almost everyone thinks about something or the other in everyday life. However, the question to be asked is how many people think creatively? You will be surprised with the statistics. Most of the people find it difficult to recall the last time they explored their imaginative power. In this fast-paced life, we find people becoming mechanical and not using their creative skills quite often. However, exploring and refreshing your imaginative skills becomes vital, especially when you want to take a break from the drudgery of everyday life. Creative thinking can be thought of as the reverse of critical thinking, which incorporates scrutinizing, reasoning and fairness. By thinking creatively, one would effectively be using the ‘right’ side of the brain. If you are looking from an escape from the monotony of critical thinking, now you can! To do this, you need to give food to your brain and indulge in some creative activity. Read on to explore some interesting creative thinking activities and exercises, which can help you, rejuvenate your hidden imaginative powers.

Creative Thinking Activity & Exercise Ideas

Relate The Objects

Get two things, (edible or non-edible), which are related to each other. For instance, you can take a strawberry and a cake for the purpose.
Fetch a paper and a pen.
Write down the relation between the two things, after describing each of them separately.
The idea is to brainstorm, in order to correlate the two things, and bring as many connections between the two objects as possible.
The best way to do this exercise is to set a time limit for yourself. If you put such activities into practice, you will be able to generate ideas quickly.

Figure Out Different Meanings

One of the creative thinking activities, which can prove to be food for the brain, is to add random alphabets to a word and change its meaning completely.
For example, you can take a noun, say the name of a pet animal, like dog.
Now, use prefixes and suffixes, at random, in order to create meaningful words, each having different meaning. For instance, you can add 'ma' to dog and generate the word, 'dogma'.
Set a time limit, say 15 seconds, within which you have to figure out as many new words as possible. Not only will this exercise increase your vocabulary, but will also improve the skill of correlating things.

Expand The Word-stock

This activity is best suited if you want to increase your vocabulary.
Derive as many meaningful words as possible (each containing at least three letters) from a long word, say 'independence'.
Explore long, difficult words (having thirteen to fourteen alphabets) that you have never heard of before and try to derive new meaningful words out of them.
You can increase the level of difficulty by exploring little-known words. Make use of a thesaurus for the purpose.

Creative Uses For Objects

This activity can be attempted by all age groups, be it at a party or at school.
This is a great activity that can add a ‘creative’ twist to everyday objects such as coasters, pens, jewelery, a bottle or a cup.
Now, collect any five items like the ones mentioned above and ask the participants to list out various uses for these objects, but, creatively!
For e.g. the cup can be used as a jewelery container, the pen can be used as a hair clip and the bottle can be used as a vase for flowers.
The idea is to encourage the people to come up with whacky, crazy and creative answers. You will be surprised with the number of answers you get. Not only is this activity fun, but it will also help the participants to expand their creative horizons and thinking.

Combo-Words

This is a great exercise to stimulate your brain.
Give a random word to all the participants, for example ‘blue’.
Ask your participants to add word/words to the given word to make combinations that go well together. For example, ‘Blue baby’, ‘Blue whale’, ‘Monday blues’, etc. You will be surprised with the creative answers you get or you might get none at all! It all depends upon the complexity of the word.
To make the game more challenging, give the participants tougher words for every round.

Make A Sentence

This activity is a great exercise for both adults and children. Not only will it help build your linguistic skills, it will also teach you how to string the letters to make a logical sentence.
Gather all your participants and give them a short word. For eg: MAT.
Now, ask your participants to make a sentence using the letters in the world, in the same order. So, for MAT, a possible sentence could be ‘Make A Torch’ and so on.

DIY

This is a fun classroom activity and will definitely get your students to don their creative hats.
Make groups of three or four students and give each group a tool such as a long piece of wire, a rope, clay or anything else that can be molded.
Ask the students to make something creative or useful with the tools given and you will be surprised with the number of items the students come up with.

‘What If’

This game is a very new concept and can actually get you thinking. This intriguing brainstorming activity requires small groups of three or four students.
Ask the students to come up with the most fascinating ‘what if’ question. Ask the opposing teams or the rival teams to answer the question and move on to the next group.
Possible questions that could be asked are ‘What if a person were stranded on an island?’, ‘What if people could come back from the dead? or ‘What if people had superpowers?’.
You can then vote for the class that came up with the most creative questions and also give awards for the group that came up with logical answers.
This activity is surely a fascinating one!

This article has provided you with some useful tools and activities that can help expand your creative horizons and are sure to stimulate the brain, along with helping you unwind! Go through this article one more time and get your creative side rolling!

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Creative Thinking Activities And Exercises

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