Pica goes on to extol the virtues of letting children experience boredom. She explains that “boredom will stimulate a child’s creativity. Imagination and creativity—ideas—arise from having time to think, to ponder and reflect, or just let the mind go. A child with time on his hands will make up games, create dramas to act out, build a fort, or discover the joy of reading. A child without such time develops only the ability to do what he’s told, when he’s told to do it. And that child isn’t likely to become an adult with initiative.”

In the Out of the Box Training, “Nurturing Creativity in Children,” the author talks about choosing materials for children to explore where all the thinking hasn’t already been done for the child. Just as children experiencing boredom need to use their creativity to come up with new ideas, children who explore open-ended materials must also use their own ideas. Here’s an example:

“We try always to select and present materials that leave space for multiple interpretations to allow for many possible ideas. When talking about cooking, for example, we might use plain colored puff balls or bits of paper, rather than prescribed fake food…While a plastic apple is first and foremost an apple, a red puff ball could be an apple, a bit of red cake, or even a newly discovered alien vegetable.”