Advanced Clay Play Pt. 3

Here's another installment in my clay series since I loove it so much and there is so much you can do with it! This is a little fella I made with some FIMO clay a pal gave me. While I'm not recommending FIMO to little ones it can be great product if used for the right project. First off, its really hard and even brand new product takes a while to soften up. I think I worked with this for 10 minutes before I was able to scuplt it into anything. It works best when sculpting by adding pieces and smoothing them on. Beads would be great too. Carving doesn't work great because its so stiff (you can see this in my feet!). It hardens beautifully and my oldest son was able to make an adorable minnow which I'll have to post here next.

Backseat Drivers Paint

Vvvvvroooooommmmm!

 14 years from now we should be scared, very scared for who is going to be out on the road...but for now, they make great painters! This class, which has evolved to be mostly boys, needed a little help getting into their painting. They tend to be stingy with their paint and rarely make any sort of mess. So I decided to try something to make them come out of their artistic shells. We took some matchbox cars, and with a little demo on how to 'drive' them through a palette of tempera they went to town. I gave my youngest artistic a toy tractor that was a little bit easier for her to handle and had some really nice treads on the wheels to make interesting prints. This would be really fun to do on a looooonngggg sheet of paper, maybe even taped up on the wall in a hallway.

Circle Prints

Beginning printmaking projects can utilize many different objects. This class had printed with sponges cut into squares, triangles, and circles. I noticed that halfway through that project they started to use the printing sponges to rub and scrub the paint onto the paper! Even with a demo showing how we stamp with sponges, I suspect it had a lot to do with the absorbent qualities of sponges. These small plastic cups (one set was quarter size, the other the size of fifty cent pieces) proved to be much better. Their work suddenly had an orderly, thoughtful quality. They even filled their pages and worked methodically. We chose blue and yellow because we had just read Leo Lionni's 'Little Blue and Little Yellow'.

Collaging with fabric

I had many small fabric scraps left from puppet making with K and 1st students. While I thought my Littles were young to be constructing puppets I decided to keep the fun part by creating a project for them in which they dressed cut out body shapes with fabric collage pieces. I pre-cut on 90 lb. paper body shapes (same shape I use for gingerbread men) and cut the scraps so they were smaller (approx. 1'x1' or 1'x2') before putting them in a tray. I gave the option of sticky glue applied with brushes or small bottles of tinted clear glue (which quickly got squirted out on our people because the color was so engaging!). Once the mess was in full swing and there was plenty of glue on our people I removed the glue and prompted them to place fabric on the gluey spots. For others I put dots of glue on their people for them to cover with 'clothes'..If my students were closer to 3.5 I would probably have had them start by coloring the face area and asking them 'Where will clothes be on our bodies?' so they would have an idea of where to cover up. I also would have used box cardboard and taped a stick on it to create a puppet for older children. For my Little Littles this was plenty of gluey fun!

Clay Play pt. 2

 After we mastered the clay ball, the clay snake, and the clay pancake we added new tools every week (week 1 molds, week 2 squeezy play doh tools, week 3 rolling pin/scissors). Finally we practiced making play doh cookies by rolling out the clay with rolling pins, cutting out shapes with large plastic cookie cutters, and peeling away the excess. We spent about four classes just playing with clay and building these skills before I made the homemade air dry clay. As you can see from the photo I also took the play doh out of its original containers and put portions the size of apricots in individual plastic containers with lids. This helped to make the clay portions easier to work with, each child got their own container, and you could see the color through the container.