The focus on standardized testing in the areas of
reading and mathematics in early elementary education often
minimalizes science and the arts in the curriculum. The
science topics of health and nutrition were integrated into the
reading curriculum through read aloud books. Inclusion of
creativity skills through figural transformation drawings
allowed students to display nutrition comprehension, modeling
how these subject areas can fit into a narrowed curriculum.
This repeated measures study examined the weekly
effect of teacher lesson introduction on 19 second grade
students’ (11 female, 8 male) creativity and content knowledge
of nutrition under two conditions that alternated every
2 weeks over a 16-week period: a brief, positive, standard
lesson introduction (control) compared to a more enhanced
introduction promoting originality, risk-taking and persistence
(experimental). Students listened to read-aloud books
on nutrition and completed figural transformation drawings
related to the stories. Findings showed that student work
evidenced more creativity during the experimental condition
with a very large effect size for breaking perceived boundaries;
a large effect size for depicting movement in drawings;
medium effect sizes for fluency, originality, storytelling
articulateness, humor, wisdom, emotion, and total creative
traits; and a small effect size for elaboration. Students also
evidenced greater overall knowledge of health/nutrition
content during the experimental condition with a small effect
size. Small changes in the way a lesson was introduced had a
significant impact on student knowledge and creative performance,
indicating that early childhood teachers should
implement similar lesson introductions to increase student
creativity.

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