WHITEBOARD WALLS BOOST CHILDREN’S CREATIVITY AND ENGAGEMENT

Because whiteboard walls are by nature large, multi-purpose, easy to use, and completely open-ended, they have immense potential for stimulating children’s innate creativity and engagement in homeschool learning. For this reason, they quickly become popular teaching resources for homeschooling parents, who encourage youngsters to use the walls to release their imaginations in independent or collaborative school work and recreational activities.

There’s a great deal that a top-quality open-ended teaching medium like a whiteboard wall can offer to foster free-thinking and inventiveness in young people’s minds. Due to their large, inviting surfaces and unlimited potential uses, children feel inspired to return to whiteboard walls again and again during the school day to doodle, create spontaneous artworks, write poetry, and do other activities. This inspirational quality is not as common with writing and drawing surfaces like notebook paper, flip charts, and traditional whiteboards, whose size limitations restrict the rapid flow of ideas and images coming from children’s minds, thus making these media less exciting to use.

Doodling and drawing on whiteboard walls enhance learning

Drawing on the vast open-ended canvas of a whiteboard wall, even when using a simple technique like doodling, triggers insights and discoveries that aren’t as likely to emerge with note pads, flip charts, or other small surfaces. When children draw an object or just randomly doodle, their minds become deeply attentive and focused. And it is this high level of attention that allows youngsters to become fully conscious of what they’re doing, which in turn helps them develop thinking skills that can be applied to schoolwork and to professional or business careers later in life.

This effect is amplified when children doodle or draw on a top-quality whiteboard-coated wall because studies show that using a large upright surface like a whiteboard wall greatly increases children’s creativity and engagement in school lessons. Working with dry erase markers on the vast open-ended canvas of a whiteboard wall is a lot more fun than writing and drawing using pencil and paper on a desk or tabletop with a limited amount of area to work on. Being horizontal surfaces, desks and tables also limit children’s use of their arm, hand, and back muscles, thus slowing the development of core strength, proper pencil grip, and other motor skills that children need to lead successful lives.

Drawing or doodling with a pencil or pen and paper is thus not only less exciting than working on a whiteboard wall but also less beneficial to children’s physical and mental development. For parents who want their homeschoolers to gain the most benefit for their bodies and brains while doing academic work, having them doodle, draw, and write on a whiteboard wall is an excellent option. And it is the element of fun that prompts young students to become more excited and engaged when working with a marker on a whiteboard wall than they would be working with pencil and paper.

Whiteboard walls make schoolwork more exciting

The freedom, expansiveness, and mobility of using a large area for school work make youngsters more interested in exploring new academic material and creative ideas. In addition, errors can be readily and cleanly erased from whiteboard walls, so there’s no need for kids to be concerned about leaving a messy smudged surface as they would when frequently erasing paper. In contrast to writing in a notebook or on a flip chart, writing with dry-erase markers on a whiteboard wall is more temporary and easily erased, and hence more able to stimulate the free flow of ideas. With a few quick swipes of a microfiber cloth, mistakes or unwanted writings will disappear so that new answers or thoughts can continue to be recorded until the correct solution or the best creative idea emerges.

Drawing, doodling, and writing on whiteboard walls reflects an age-old human tradition

Drawing, sketching, and doodling are time-honored human activities that help children to learn, free associate, and produce creative new ideas. Nowadays, the flood of branded blank sketchbooks, note pads, and journals on the market is helping to generate renewed interest in these pursuits. However, such paper-based materials have to be used while sitting near-horizontal surfaces such as tables, counters, or desks. And this position can hinder aspects of children’s psychomotor development by making them look down, hunch over, sit in a slouched posture, and limit their arm, wrist, and hand movements. By comparison, drawing or doodling on a whiteboard wall requires children to stand upright and use large sweeping motions to make images and write text, thus improving their skills in many important areas of physical and cognitive growth, including bilateral coordination, eye-hand coordination, and core strength.

It seems that the need to draw and doodle is hardwired into the human brain. In fact, among our early ancestors, the making of graphic markings on walls began long before the use of spoken language, as reflected in the world-famous prehistoric cave paintings at Lascaux in southern France. Thus, both random doodling and more methodical free-hand drawing have long been essential to human beings for conveying creative ideas and feelings.

The practice of writing on vertical surfaces like walls, called epigraphy, has also existed since time immemorial, with cases dating back to ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. So, when children write, draw, or doodle on a whiteboard wall, they’re engaging in a natural human activity that goes back for millennia. Epigraphy serves different functions from writing on horizontal surfaces such as tables, counters, and desks or typing on computers or laptops because wall writing cultivates improved eye-hand coordination, visual attention, and other skills that children need for success in their studies and in daily life.

Whiteboard walls facilitate seeing “the big picture”

Also, on the broad expanse of a whiteboard-coated wall, children can view large writings or drawings at a single glance, thus making it easier for them to “get the big picture” when studying maps in geography, timelines in history, or graphic content in other subject areas. Thus, by far the most effective and engaging epigraphic medium for homeschool use is a large high-quality whiteboard-coated wall.

The vast, flexible, and limitless nature of premium whiteboard-coated walls allow them to constantly adapt and grow in step with the needs and skill levels of homeschoolers as they develop physically, academically, and creatively. Thus, both the instructional uses and productive potential of whiteboard walls are never-ending for both parents and children. As such, a whiteboard-coated wall in the homeschool environment can become a highly valued resource that inspires endless amounts of imaginative, engaged, and distinctive work and entertainment.

Creative Work Enhances Self Esteem and Family Bonding

Another significant point to note is that working creatively on a whiteboard wall in the homeschool setting can help to raise children’s self-esteem and improve the quality of family bonds. Expressing their creative images and ideas easily and freely on a whiteboard wall helps children feel good about themselves, and the ongoing encouragement of parents can help in this process. When given challenging art assignments that are appropriate for their level and that they can draw with a reasonable amount of effort, kids will be delighted at their accomplishments. The feat of successfully completing such creative tasks will encourage children to try even more challenging work in the future, and with a parent’s ongoing supervision and support, this can easily be accomplished.

Such activities reinforce the bond between parents and children because they have so many ideas to share that can easily be expressed on a whiteboard-coated wall. Grandparents may also be included in the idea-sharing. Whoever kids choose to interact in this way, working on whiteboard walls will definitely make their creative activities fun and help to improve family relations in the process.

Dry Erase Paint