The 21st century is full of challenges - global ones, local ones, financial, ethical, religious, practical and personal ones. And who knows what problems children in school today will face in their working and learning lives? That's why it's essential to get their minds limbered up and fighting fit right now - ready for the interesting, demanding and rewarding problems that the 21st and 22nd centuries will throw at them.

Each week Great Ideas offers a different problem and four random items that children can use to creatively solve it. It helps them to develop creative problem solving.

How would you use each of these items to catch a bear?

• The flower produces a scent that sends the bear to sleep.
• Sneak up to the bear and put the shell in its ear. The sea sound will send it to sleep.
• Climb a tree and dangle the berries just out of its reach
• Lay a cake-crumb trail

Using two or more items together:

• Crush the berries; use the red juice to make the seashell look like a piece of juicy meat; the bear bites it and shell becomes stuck in his mouth. You offer to remove the shell if the bear does as you say!

Guidance

Great Ideas develops creative problem solving skills. Children have to work out how each of four objects could be used to solve an interesting challenge. Most of the objects will not be obvious choices e.g. a flower to rescue a cat from up a tree; a cheese grater to fill a paddling pool. But prompts like these jolt the brain into new thinking and kick start creativity: compare the thinking needed to rescue the cat using a ladder, or fill a paddling pool with a bucket.

See what ideas the children come up with when they use the items one at a time. Let them hear each others' ideas and build on them. Then ask them to use two or more items combined to create new solutions.

Progression

As children produce more and more creative solutions over the weeks and months, you can begin to help them decide which ideas are better than others. Develop with them criteria for 'an OK solution', 'a creative solution' and 'a really creative solution'. For example, the best solutions may take the longest to think up, or use all four items, or be the ones to which most people go, "oooo...that's good".

You can also help them to make the connection between this activity and problem solving in curriculum subjects/other aspects of school and home life. A real and pressing problem can sometimes be solved in an innovative way by picking a few random objects and getting creative with them. How would you use an apple, a nail, a hedge and a key to prepare for inspection......