4 Phrases From Gianni Rodari That Encourage Children’s Creativity

How do stories really work? How do ideas arise and how do they flourish? These questions led Gianni Rodari to write a book entitled The Grammar of Fantasy in 1973.

In his book, he goes through some ideas and ways to come up with and create stories for children, and which in turn can help children invent their own stories. Rodari later wrote other works especially for children so that they could develop their creativity.

Gianni Rodari, as the great mediator of imagination he was, wrote down many phrases from the 1970s onwards. After all these years, his words remain remarkably relevant even today thanks to his modern ways of thinking. Today we are going to look at some of the best of his formulations.

4 ingenious phrases from Gianni Rodari

Playing with words and with the imagination is really not a waste of time. It is about facing reality and taking control of the words. Gianni Rodari’s words show us that children can be truly active creators.

Encourage children’s creativity and imagination

In the imagination, children have the ability to change what is not right, or to change the world that has been forced upon them. We must encourage children’s creativity and imagination from a very young age, and this should have a central place in education.

Teach children to think

Rodari came to the following conclusion: “If we want to teach children to think, we must first teach them to invent.” By giving children a dose of imagination to encourage their ingenuity, it helps them enrich their perception of reality and life itself.

We must not impose imagination on reality

“Imagination is not a big, naughty wolf to be afraid of, nor is it a criminal that must be constantly monitored, but instead an extraordinarily rich world that we have marginalized in our foolishness.”

This is one of Gianni Rodari’s statements from 1990, and one that inspired many fantastic children’s stories. His words teach us that reality must not neutralize the imagination. And on the contrary, imagination should not be forced on reality either.

Both must complement each other to nurture and promote children’s literature. It is a process that combines reality with imagination, along with talent and creativity.

A single word can make a big difference

“Throwing a rock in a still pond creates waves on the surface that affect everything in their path.”

This metaphor explains in a poetic language the human ability to react to a single word. When a stone is thrown into a quiet pond, rings are created on the water surface, which gives rise to various events and affects everything inside the pond and also around it.

Rodari’s resources to encourage children’s creativity

In Rodari’s books you can find many different storytelling techniques but also resources that can help develop a child’s creativity and imagination. They include the following:

• The fantastic word pair. This activity consists of giving a person two words that are not related to each other at all. You have to take these two words and make a story with them.
• Story or fable. Rodari changed the idea behind certain stories and their plot, for example in Tummeliten .
• Words like instructions. In this activity, the person must use a group of words or pictures that are not related to each other and then create a story that links them together.

• What would happen if…? Here the children have to create a story by asking a strange question, for example: “What would happen if the wind disappeared?”
• Mix stories. In this activity you have to mix characters, places and events from two completely different stories. This can be done at the beginning or end of the story. It is a fantastic activity to develop a child’s creativity.
• Invent a riddle. The children must find a riddle here by trying to associate and compare words.

Gianni Rodari’s statements continue to be extremely relevant today despite globalization and modern technology. They help us discover the benefits of using our imagination to solve problems and then teach this to our children.