Creativity in the Classroom

The ASCAP Foundation and i-SAFE, a nonprofit foundation dedicated to protecting the online experiences of youth, have partnered to provide teachers with a set of tools to educate their students in the seldom taught area of intellectual property. This unique curriculum for grades 3 and 4, called Creativity in the Classroom: Creative Ownership and Copyright, is designed to help students recognize their own creative work and understand their rights as owners of intellectual property as well as the ethics of protecting and respecting the creative property of others.

The premise of the program is to encourage students to label their own creative work with the copyright symbol, year and their name just as they would see on any published, professional creative work. This premise is linked by teachers to their students via the assertions that:

• Students do creative work in many of their classes

• As creators, students need to understand and live by the ethics of creation

The lesson plans are designed to teach young students fundamental intellectual property concepts as well as to teach young learners that their work and the creativity of others should be respected. By exposing preteens to the concepts of ownership and copyright we plan to proactively and positively affect their future behavior and their awareness of the value of creativity and the concept of ownership.

The curriculum unit is available free of charge to i-SAFE certified teachers. Encourage teachers you know to go to a special page on the i-SAFE Web site for more information on how to become certified. Parents who want their children exposed to these dynamic intellectual property lesson plans are encouraged to call their local school and suggest that it be taught in their classrooms.