The Child and the growth of the imagination...All Ages...

"If you want your children to be intelligent,
read them fairy tales.
If you want them to be more intelligent,
read them more fairy tales."  Albert Einstein

The imagination is something that we are born with, but it has to be nurtured, and books and stories and fairy tales can encourage the imagination to soar.

There are some children's books which are better than others for this encouragement, especially if the illustrations encourage the imagination as well as the subject matter.


Creative Courage for Young Hearts: 15 Emboldening Picture Books Celebrating the Lives of Great Artists, Writers, and Scientists | Brain Pickings

Check this sight out to see these books that encourage the imagination!!

http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/04/13/picture-book-biographies/

by 
Jane Goodall, Julia Child, Pablo Neruda, Marie Curie, E.E. Cummings, Albert Einstein, Ella Fitzgerald, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Frida Kahlo, and more.
Margaret Mead extolled the value of “spiritual and mental ancestors” in how we form our identity — those people to whom we aren’t related but whose values we try to cultivate in ourselves; role models we seek out not from our immediate genetic pool but from the pool of culture the surrounds us, past and present. Seneca saw in reading, one of the oldest and most reliable ways to identify and contact these cultural ancestors, a way of being adopted into the “households of the noblest intellects.” And what better time to meet such admirable models of personhood than in childhood, that fertile seedbed for the flowering of values and identity?
Collected here are thirteen wonderful picture-books celebrating such worthwhile “spiritual and mental ancestors.” It is, of course, an incomplete reading list, yet it is a deliberate one — a great many such books exist, but few feature the trifecta of wonderfulness: a cultural icon notable for his or her lasting contribution to humanity beyond mere fame; an intelligent and nuanced life-story lovingly told; and beautiful, imaginative illustrations rewarding in their own right. Please enjoy.
JANE GOODALL
“One should want only one thing and want it constantly,” young AndrĂ© Gide half-observed, half-resolved in his journal“Then one is sure of getting it.”More than a century later, Werner Herzog wrote passionately of the “uninvited duty” that a sense of purpose plants in the heart, leaving one with “no choice but to push on.”That combination of desiring something with inextinguishable intensity — which begins with letting your life speak and daring to listen — and pursuing it with steadfast doggedness is perhaps the single common thread in the lives of those we most admire as luminaries of enduring genius. It is also at the heart of what it means to find your purpose and live it.
In Me…Jane (public library), celebrated cartoonist, author, and animal rights advocate Patrick McDonnell chronicles the early life of pioneering primatologist Jane Goodall (b. April 3, 1934) and tells the heartening story of how the seed planted by a childhood dream blossomed, under the generous beams of deep dedication, into the reality of a purposeful life.
McDonnell’s protagonist is not Jane Goodall the widely influential and wildly revered science and spiritualitysage of science and the human spirit — one of a handful of people in history to have both the titles Dame and Doctor — but little Jane, the ten-year-old girl who decided that she was going to work with animals in Africa when she grew up and, despite her family’s poverty, despite living in an era when girls were not encouraged to live the life of science or adventure, despite nearly everyone telling her that it was impossible, turned her dream into reality.
With simple, enormously expressive illustrations and an eloquent economy of words, McDonnell — creator of the beloved MUTTS comic strip — begins at the very beginning: that fateful day when little Jane was given a stuffed monkey named Jubilee.
See more at the above site by Maria Popova and Brainpickings.org

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