Envelope of Awesome is a Monthly Subscription service that sends a huge envelope full of engaging activities to inspire and cultivate creativity in young people aged between 5 and 12.
Steps to Awesomeness
Creativity, a Growth Mindset & Education
Nurture Communication and Self-Expressio
Through clever use of words, images and an open-ended approach to the activitiesEofA allows children to hone their visual and linguistic communication skills. Allowingthem more avenues for self-expression and creativity.
Encourage a Growth Mindse
Asking open ended questions and allowing the child to explore without fear of right orwrong answers encourages feeling comfortable with ambiguity.
Develop Creativity & Lateral Thinking
The key to any successful life is an ability to be creative, motivated and engage indivergent thinking. EofA encourages this in many ways, pushing the child to thinkoutside the box and come up with creative answers to novel questions and challenges.Creative thinking enables children to interpret and appreciate the real meaning ofbeing literate and numerate. (Ken Robinson 1999
Foster Curiosity & Wonder
Being exposed to new ideas, images and words encourages children to seek out newinformation and see that the world is full of possibilities.
Cultivate Confidence & Self Motivation
Writing directly to the child, using positive language and sending a letter directlywritten to them helps lift self-confidence and boosts self-esteem.
How does it grow creativity?
A drawing prompt like the above allows the child to answer the open-ended question. Exploring different ideas without the fear of being “right” or “wrong”.
Why?
The Fake or Joke ad allows children to wield their critical thinking skills and be prompted to be self aware in media consumption. It allows them to practice their critical fact checking and truth seeking skills in a safe and humorous way.
Why?
The comic encourages literacy in a fun and engaging way but also shows narrative and story as a form of expression that the child may want to emulate. Thus forcing them to think constructively about the structure of narrative and story and how to put that into place themselves.
Why?
Every envelope has a letter written directly to the child. This, as well as literacy skills, encourages a boosting in self-esteem. We always try to add in positive messaging directly to the child. Here you can see I have written fellow Awesome Human which presupposes that the child is Awesome. This intentionally boosts the child’s positive view of themselves. In another example I use a deliberate spoonerisation of “Happy New Year” to give the impression to the children that it’s ok to make mistakes. Keep cool, Keep Drawing also presupposes that the child is “Cool” to begin with.
Why?
Colouring in Encourages mindfulness, calmness, concentration and also improves fine motor skills. This can lead to better handwriting in general which improves confidence in literacy and communication skills.
Why?
Here we play with the conventions of instruction and learning, prompting the children to think laterally and Creatively. This also helps them to realise the function of instructions and methods and allows them to imagine possibilities that diverge from the norm.
Why?
The fun fact cards are a way that EofA exposes children to new ideas about the world, but also encourages them to imagine the possibilities of what effects that fact might have. Here you can see I have drawn mushrooms coming out of the bread, but in the text we mention that yeast is a single celled organism, which doesn’t grow mushrooms. This hopefully will trigger children to ask questions like. “What does single cell mean?” or “Are there types of fungi that don’t grow mushrooms..? What is a fungi anyway?”
What makes EofA Awesome?
A Monthly Subscription pack full of custom illustrated content designed to inspire creativity and confidence through Cartooning for Ages 5 - 12 years. Each Envelope includes how-to-draw pages, creative challenges, humour, badges,stickers, drawing prompts and a letter from Simon our illustrator!
