The Missing Alphabet
From New World Kids, A Parent’s Guide to Creative Thinking
By Susan Marcus and Susie Monday
Color
Human vision is distinguished by the color-detecting ability of our eyes, and so for us color is often the element of discernment — and the visual language of emotion. Green with envy, seeing red, walking around under a black cloud, emotion transforms itself into colorful characters, colorful language, poetic passion. Paint on canvas creates sunny weather or an emotional storm; and music paints a picture solemn or spritely. Where is your color sense alive? In cooking or chemistry, stargazing or paint mixing, finding rainbows, delighting in a feather’s iridescence or in an outlandishly fashionable fashion sense?
Sound
Sound has the inherent quality of acting directly on the emotions without going through the intellect. Listen. The world is speaking to you in a thousand different voices. When we listen, we put ourselves in the moment. Present to an argument, a plea, a whine, a bird call, wind in the trees or a symphony. Besides the obvious (musicians and music), actors, politicians, priests and teachers invoke action with tone, timber, tempo and sound. Writers (and readers) listen as words unfurl on the page. Painters may paint a sound and runners may use one to make the miles fly. Ecologists, anthropologists, birdwatchers, linguists and physicians – all use sound to diagnose, distinguish and define.
Space
Space is omni dimensional, geographic and temporal, both geometrically present outside of us, and metaphorically present inside the fences of our imaginations. With space, what isn’t is as important as what is: the inside of a basket, the silences between the notes, the pause between the speakers, the room inside the walls. The way a canvas size or a room’s dimensions determine how we move within it. As humans we can’t help but pay attention to space as space and space as time. How long? How wide? How fast? How slow? Where and when? Think about how these people use and analyze space: mechanical engineers, publishers, architects, dancers, cartographers, chess players, editors, sit com writers.
Movement
Movement is about change and getting from here to there, from up to down, from then to now. We talk about how ideas move us, how ambition gets us there, that responsibility keeps us tied down, how our imaginations run away and our philosophies collide. A storyline must move right along or it loses our attention; cycles of days and years and viewpoints become the stuff of history; cycles in our bodies, in weather, in nature present whole worlds of study. Kinesthetic learners must move into knowledge, often quite literally, finding the meaning of a concept by physically moving into it. Movers include (but
are not limited to) explorers, botanists, meteorologists, dancers, acrobats, athletes, construction workers, industrial designers.
Rhythm
Rhythm is the heartbeat element, holding things together in big and little patterns. We each have a personal rhythm that is as distinct as our fingerprints, recognizable beneath the changing tides of emotional rhythms that rock and rollus through the day. Rhythm at first thought is audible and invisible – drum beats, finger taps, cadences and cacaphony, but imagine the world without stripes, dots and dashes, without the visual patterns of steps, of lines of shoes, of the this and that way of the lines in a leaf. Without rhythm who could be a pianist, a mathematician, a poet, an actor, a director, a salesman, a video editor, a debator, a basketball player, a waiter, a politician, an animal behaviorist or a juggler?
Light
Light delights as the most elusive and changeable element of form: giving contour, creating mood, illuminating all manners of truth. The sea sparkles, pearls have luster, silk shimmers, we “see the light.” Stage designers, cinematographers, photographers and architects are obvious masters of light and shadow– but think too about light as perceived by physicists, by glass artists, by poets and urban planners. Without light, we’re literally and figuratively “in the dark.” Fireflies, fireworks, shadow play and starlight are some of our first light-filled fascinations – what are others?
Line
Line, the elemental foundation for print and number, has determined much about 20th Century life and success in our culture. Isobars, arteries, fault lines, line drives, battle lines, lines of credit, timelines, lines of type, notes, numbers and people — stretchy, slinky, fixed or floating, dotted or dashed, lines connect two or more points. And the points are, as mathematicians remind us, infinite. Writers pen story lines; programmers, lines of code. Biologists decipher lines of DNA; entrepreneurs develop product lines. Singers follow melodic lines; jazz musicians improvise upon them. Where do you enter the element of line? As story teller or scribbler? With delight for a maze or an appreciation for ballet?
Shape
“Shapes shape other shapes.” As shapefinders we look for symmetries, for foreground and background, the donut and the hole, for the whole of the thing that is greater than its parts. Putting puzzles together is playing around with shape, and so is the literary love of beginning, middle and end. Pleasing shapes play their part in our neighborhoods, our furniture, our plates, platters, shoes and cars. Shapemakers include sculptors and typographers, mathematicians with their worlds of symmetries, microbiologists, industrial designers and couture clothiers. We shape play with shells and rocks, clay and cookie dough, big bouncing balls and smooth, sleek kitty cats.
Texture
At its most direct, tactile information is as close as it gets, up close and personal, right at our fingertips. Smooth, woven, wrapped, slippery, shiny, course, rigid and reedy. We see texture, too, and hear it in a voice or a song. Our days are rough or smooth, our moods even or edgy, our needs piercing or pointed. Surgeons, weavers, gardeners, art collectors, textile designers and chefs must all pay close attention to texture. Does your child explore texture in the sandbox, through a microscope’s lens, coiling clay snakes, eating ice cream or squishing toes in the mud?
