Illustrated by Obayomi Aanuoluwapo and Dirisu David
A beautiful multicultural picture book that teaches children about life in rural Ghana.
Kwame is respectful, obedient, and grateful for his simple life in a rural village. In this story, Kwame wakes early to help his mother wash clothes by hand. Then he sweeps the dirt floor of his one room hut before dressing in his uniform to walk to school at the Royal Promise Mission. Today is a special day. The children from around the area will be marching to celebrate the anniversay of Ghana’s independence.
Children from around the world learn a bit about the food, flag, customs , language, and difficult life of a small rural village. Kwame provides a good role model for children. Charming illustrations and an interactive activity keep readers engaged with the tale.
Highly recommended to parents and teachers of elementary school readers.
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If you have listened to me on a podcast, watched one of my you tube videos, or read this blog, you probably already know how passionate I am about the importance of learning how to think both critically and creatively and the importance of passing down these skills to our children.
Today, I would like to explain in this short article, how to quickly develop your superpower using these two ways of thinking.
In this short report, I want to introduce you to an innovative way of thinking and problem solving that combines creative and critical thinking. These two approaches are very different. Each of them has advantages and disadvantages. By combining the two, you can tap into the power of both.
Let’s start by taking a look at creative thinking, what it is, and how we can start to think more creatively. The phrase most often used to describe creative thinking is “think outside the box.” I like to think about it as a way to think about something in a new and different way. Look for the not so obvious solutions not thought of by anyone else. Yes, it will be out of the box thinking, but it can be so much more.
Let’s look at an example of creative thinking. Suppose you just bought a new house, and between the cost of the down payment and renovations you had to make, you’re broke. Your neighborhood association sends you a letter that your yard needs to be redone to fit in with the overall landscape. There’s no money in the budget for landscaping. What do you do?
You have to get creative. The obvious answer is to do it yourself, but that takes time, money, and skill that you may not have. Some creative options may be to get in touch with an up and coming landscaping company to see if they are willing to redo your yard for free or at cost price in exchange for putting up a sign to advertise their business in your yard. If you have web design skills, you could barter those in exchange for the work. Think outside the box and come up with a creative solution.
To get your creative thinking cap on, you can ask yourself some interesting questions:
Start with what if. Keep it very open-ended. In this first brainstorming stage, no idea is too ridiculous or impossible to throw out. While the idea itself may turn out to be unusable, it may spark a creative thought that will lead you to the perfect solution.
Another great question to ask is “What else.” It encourages brainstorming and expanding on existing ideas. Last but not least, you can spark creativity by introducing an off the wall concept. For example, you could pretend that you have no income for the following year. How would you live and how would you pay for your home and renovations, including the yard? The solution may be to work on a side hustle like graphic and web design for small businesses in your area. That, in turn, will help you realize that you can pay for the landscaping by spending a few weekends on freelance projects.
Another problem-solving skill is critical thinking. It’s very different from creative thinking. Here the idea is to think logically and work from information and data collected. You start with the information gathering process and then sort and analyze it to find the best solution. You want to be as objective and unbiased as possible and come up with the best possible judgment based on the information you have.
For example, if you are a project manager for a construction firm, you would gather information on what you need on the job site and then order the materials at the best price you can find. Another example a little closer to home would be the critical thinking you use when you’ve lost your car keys. You start to search the house room by room, possibly retracing your steps until you find them. That’s a small-scale example, but it gives you an idea of what critical thinking is.
The significant advantage of critical thinking, as opposed to creative thinking, is that you usually come up with a workable solution. When you let your creativity run too wild, you end up with a fun potential solution but possibly not something that will work or even something you want to attempt to try.
Let me show you what I mean by an off the wall example that will illustrate my point. Let’s say you want to lose 25 pounds. When thinking creatively, you realize that the average human leg weighs about 26 pounds. Cutting one of yours off would instantly result in a 25+ pound weight loss. While creative, it’s also absolutely ridiculous.
When you switch to critical thinking, you gather data and information on various weight loss programs as well as how the biological process of burning body fat works. As a result, you fast intermittently, eat more whole foods, and start to go for daily walks. It’s a much more workable solution, isn’t it?
Think about some other times when you’ve used critical thinking to make important decisions. Maybe it was choosing the right health insurance or 401K plan. Maybe it was picking a house in a good neighborhood with great schools for your kids that fit within your budget. Maybe it was whether or not to make a big career move or relocate to a different area of the country. We use critical thinking skills all the time. They serve us well at home, school, and work.
Last but not least, we come to the fun stuff. In this section, we take a look at how we can combine creative and critical thinking to come up with out of the box solutions to problems that work. By combining both critical and creative thinking, we can take advantage of the benefits of both while avoiding the downsides.
Let’s go back to the silly weight loss example to show how this can work in action. Again the idea is to lose a fair amount of weight. Cutting off a limb is obviously not an option, but we can take a look at some of the reasons that make this an attractive consideration. We lose a set amount of weight, and we lose it in a set amount of time. That may spark a thought about tracking weight loss in interesting increments (like losing the equivalent of 3 packs of butter, or the equivalent of your arm’s weight). It may also inspire us to set a date for which we want to have x number of pounds gone. It may even get us to think about and consider surgical alternatives like liposuction or stomach stapling. While those may not end up being the right solutions for you, it’s good to include them and think about those options. You never know where they may lead you.
Looking into weight loss surgery may have you considering alternatives like fasting. At the very least, it will serve as a motivator if you want to avoid surgery at all costs.
In this case, we started out with creative thinking and then moved into critical thinking. We got a complete picture, collected a lot of data, and then analyzed it logically to come up with the best solution. That’s a great way to approach this process.
Another option is to start with critical thinking, then switch to creative thoughts to come up with more alternatives and more data sources. Then go back to critical thinking to determine what will work in the end.
By combining these two ways of thinking, we can come up with new and innovative solutions that will work. At other times we may find that the old tried and true way of doing things is popular for a reason. It may end up being the best possible solution. We won’t know that though until we’ve thought about it critically and creatively, working through all possible alternative options.
That’s why combining aspects of both critical and creative thinking is such a powerful strategy. Give it a try the next time you face a complex problem. Since switching between thinking creatively and analytically can be a little tricky at first, it can be helpful to sit down and work on creative brainstorming first. Get out a notebook and spend some time thinking of as many ideas as you can and write them down. Walk away for a bit and then get to work on the critical thinking part of the process, collecting more data, organizing it, analyzing it, and finally coming up with a workable solution. Rinse and repeat as needed until you find something that works well for you.
The more you get in the habit of practicing those creative and critical thinking skills and combining them, the better you get at it. Before long the entire process will become an integral part of how you approach problem-solving.
Want to learn how to become a problem solver today?
I recently had the opportunity to present Little Miss HISTORY in animation. Thanks to Silas Merlin, who created the avatar, the character has come to life.
Little Miss HISTORY insists, “If you don’t know your history, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” On the day of our birth, we become a character in history because each of us has an opportunity to create our story and place our mark on history.
As we stand here in the twenty-first century, technology allows us to immerse ourselves in history. In 2003, Linden Lab launched a program called Second Life. Its users, who are called residents, use this technology to create virtual representations of themselves. These avatars can explore the virtual world, socialize and participate with other residents in a group or individual activities. Second Life has its own virtual currency that allows residents to create, shop, and trade virtual property with one another.
In 2014, Linden Lab announced a plan to develop a new virtual world. Content creators began working on the program named Project Sansar. The platform was released in “creator beta” to the public in July 2017. Users create 3D spaces where people can create and share social experiences such as watching videos, playing games, and having conversations. Participants are represented by avatars they create. These avatars contain speech-driven facial animations and motion driven body animations.
Sansar supports virtual reality headsets but can also be accessed with Windows computers. The program is free to use, but like Second LifeSansar has its own economy. Users can buy and sell their virtual creations with the Sansar dollar.
HOW DID LITTLE MISS HISTORY GET INVOLVED IN VIRTUAL REALITY? A few months ago, I was approached by Bernhard Drax to appear on his Book Club Radio podcast. When I heard that Little Miss HISTORY would have an opportunity to appear in virtual reality, I jumped at the opportunity.
Via “draxtor”..and media for all! Drax and his team now offer audio-visual storytelling for many media platforms. Bernhard Drax studied audio engineering at the University of California at Los Angeles and music at the Hochschule fur Musik and Theater Munchen. He is an expert in user-created content in Virtual Reality. His award-winning mixed reality documentary series “The Drax Files: World Makers” is just one of his many video series featured on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/user/draxtordespres
I invite you to join us in a discussion about books, education, and history, past, present, and future!
Check out Little Miss HISTORY’s journey into virtual reality!
If you would like to read the entire interview on the podcast, please go here:
This is a wonderful and innovative book for children in middle grades and older. It serves as an introduction to one of Plato’s works, The Allegory of the Cave, as well as a bird’s eye view of ancient Greece and its importance to the Western world today.
At the beginning of the book, the reader meets the philosopher Socrates and his student, Aristotle just finishing a lesson. Portraits of Socrates and Aristotle are given as well as thumbnails of the poem which has Plato visiting the oracle in the cave to discern its mystery. Side by side with the allegorical tale, the author presents what he calls, “Bites” of Greek knowledge. These include the government of Athens, Mount Olympus and its gods, the Library of Alexandria, Greek education, the Oracle of Delphi, notions of Arete, and Greek architecture, Greek theater, art, religion, and geography. These small bites pack an abundance of material on each page.
The black and white pencil drawings of the allegorical tale are combined with humor to contrast nicely with the colorful photos of sculpture, paintings, and Greek artifacts. Students are introduced to a plethora of subjects in an easily digestible format. Teachers have an unlimited field of possibilities when using this book as jump off point of discussion for history, literature, philosophy, government, art and science. Any child age nine and older should be able to find an area of interest for further exploration. As a historian, I was impressed by the succinct but pithy descriptions and the well balanced text. Highly recommended to parents, librarians, teachers and budding scholars who want to learn about ancient Greece in a nutshell! I am confident that most readers will be encouraged to explore to learn more.
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March 30, 2025
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