I can say that without a doubt, I’ve excelled more at something when creativity was involved. I think I learned at an early age that I felt happier and more included in a task when I could use my imagination to help complete a project.

Looking back, I have elementary school to thank for that. I went to a school that had a very hands-on approach to learning. The student’s parents helped in the classroom and we always had different stations we would rotate to to help us learn about a subject from many different angles.

Each classroom would be a part of the monthly assemblies in the cafeteria where we would sing songs. We didn’t know it then but they were educational songs, they were always catchy so we didn’t know we were learning at the same time.

I was in a group of six girls who got together one day during recess and decided we were going to tour around to different classrooms and put on a little skit set to a song. The song we chose was Chicken Soup With Rice based on the book by Maurice Sendak.

Still to this day, I can’t believe our teacher let us skip class time to go to other classrooms to put on our skit. We organized and set up the times we would go to the other classrooms and our teacher trusted us enough to let us leave class and walk next door or across the hall to another room. We each took two different months and acted out the lyrics.

Our first show was in our own classroom so our teacher knew the material we would be touring with!

I feel like this goes to show how creativity and music was so much a part of our daily lives that we were thinking of ways that we could share our skit with other kids. Music and creativity has been a way of life for as long as I can remember!