Tag Archives: clay

Creativity, Expressive Arts

Different stages of clay

Leave a comment

At Cart Mill this week the younger children have been exploring the clay in the new 2-3 room called the pond.

We started off with a big block of clay and discussed what clay is. The children describe it as playdough. Yes, it’s very like playdough but clay comes from the earth. It’s cold and messy in your hands. As the children start to feel the clay. We encourage them to talk about how it feels and what do they notice about the clay.

“Hard”

“Good”

”Stuck on my fingers”

The children used their hands to pull the clay off they then explored the clay further by squeezing, rolling and piling up the clay.

“I’m getting a big bit”

”I’m rolling it”

We will continue to offer opportunity for the toddlers to use all their sense to explore the clay learning different techniques to manipulate the clay with our hands. Ie pinch, squeeze, roll and how to stick it together.

Our 3-5 children have been exploring our clay further by making clay models. With the change in season and frosty weather outside the children have been interested in making snowmen with the clay.

Recently the children have been making clay model and painting them but find the clay is fragile and can break easily. We started to discuss how we can make it stronger. The children suggested things like we need to be careful with it, not rolling it to thin and make it bigger.  I suggested to make the clay hold  together we could add some small sticks in the middle of the clay to hold the snowman’s body together.   While making the snowmen we challenged the older children to split their clay into 3 parts using the language of quality such as ‘some’ ‘a bit’ and ‘equal’

while we waited for our clay snowmen to dry. We set about making a winter wonderland town backdrop to play with our snowmen. This involved drawing some houses on cardboard  and cutting it out to create our sky line.

With the clay taking a long time to dry. The children have been enjoying lots of role play with the stone people and are excited to see there snowmen dry to paint and play with.

Our snowmen have been a huge hit with the children. Some children have started to create a whole family of snowmen. ☃️⛄️☃️⛄️

Creativity

Building a Zoo

Leave a comment

In the clay area we have been exploring different animals shapes and sizes while creating our own animals.

Will reading Dear Zoo we talking about the different features of the animals. We noticed some had long necks, big ears, 4 legs or even no legs.

We introduce some animal shape models for the children to explore. The children had fun experimenting with different sized leaf’s and sticks and were able to create there own unique animal.

Once they were able to select their own leafs and sticks to create their chosen animal. The next step was to model the clay and transfer the sticks and leafs to create their very own animal to take home.

Here are some of the children’s creations along with their comments while making them.


“I’m making a giraffe this is its long neck”


“Its a horse”

“These little flower are for the eyes”

“He need a tail I’m going to cut it smaller”


“I’m making a rabbit”

”It’s got big ears”

 

Uncategorized

Creative little minds 💡

Leave a comment

This week in the clay area, there have been lots of creative little minds busy at work!

The children have had lots of learning opportunities while exploring the clay, and have shared lots of imaginative ideas with their peers 💡

Some of the children liked using the tools to create little intricate flowers 🌺

 

some children enjoyed creating shapes and patterns with various equipment…

Other children even designed little small world creations too 👩🏼‍🎨

“it’s a little island for the ninja turtles. I used shells so the water can go through under the island”

“let’s make a little tunnel for the cars “

While clay has many benefits to children’s fine motor skills, it also engages many social skills through sharing ideas, solving problems or even encouraging each other through conversation as they play and learn.

It has been so thought provoking and interesting to see how many fantastic ideas the children have shared, and how each child’s experience of clay has been unique and individual to their little personalities. Keep up the good work everybody 😁👍

Uncategorized

Learning emotions through Clay

Leave a comment

Over the last week, the children have been exploring different emotions at the clay area. They have been selecting various loose parts to create their faces and express their thoughts and feelings through their model making.

Learning about emotions helps children become more aware and understand their own and others emotions and also allow them to better regulate their own responses to strong emotions. Helping to support children in recognising and identifying their emotions is an important first step.

”Here is a happy face”

”This face is a sad one, I made it go down like that, the mouth goes down like this”

The children used different techniques such as rolling, cutting and moulding to create their different faces which also develops the fine motor movements in their hands and their fingers.

”I made lots of different faces, they are happy ones, my mummy will be happy when I show her too”

Article 29 – I have the right to an education which develops my personality, respect for others and the environment.

 

Expressive Arts, Literacy

Getting messy with the clay!

Leave a comment

In the clay area the children have been discussing how the clay feels to them when they touch it. They used some great adjectives like soft, cold, hard and good! We wrote out our words and put them in the clay area for everyone to see.

The children enjoyed rolling the clay using the rolling pins to make it flat like pancakes!

”It’s hard to get it flat!”

We decided to add water to our clay to see what happened! At first we put a few sprinkles of water on which the children thought did not make a difference! They wanted to pour out more water! When they did this they were excited to see how squishy and soft the clay got! They found it much easier to shape on the boards.

“It’s like a big mud pie!”

”It’s all sticky to my hands,”

The clay was very easy to roll when wet but the children did notice it made more mess on the boards which they liked! They decided to make food with their clay!

“It’s a yummy pizza!”

Playing with clay has many benefits for children.  It is good for sensory development and expanding their imagination. Clay also promotes the development of children’s fine motor skills.

Expressive Arts, Social Studies, Technologies

Creative clay ⚒

Leave a comment

In the clay area today the children have been super creative and using their design skills and imagination to create models. We have also been exploring and using different tools and techniques to create patterns and prints on the clay…

we used lots of different loose parts to create some “birthday cakes” and sang happy birthday to our friends.

then we used different tools to copy and create patterns and textures on the clay, we practiced hammering, rolling and creating prints showing how creative and imaginative we can be!


Exploring with clay helps to develop our hand eye co-ordination and fine motor manipulating skills. It gives the children the opportunity to socialise with their friends through talking and listening to each other’s ideas and also work independently.

i wonder what creations we will make over the next few weeks! 🤩

 

Expressive Arts

Creative Clay Creations

Leave a comment

Today in the Studio we continued our experiment with clay. We have been learning about the difference in textures between clay and playdough, as well as the difference between wet and dry clay. So, today we took our learning one step further to investigate what we can make, by adding loose parts to our clay station.

We added some buttons, wooden sticks, paper straws, corks and our clay tools and markers as a invitation to spark the creative minds of our early learners.

We used our gross motor skills to roll out the clay, using the large rolling pins. We even tried using the other end of the rolling pin to make marks and indents into the clay.

Some of us used the clay hammers to create marks or flatten the clay to make it more malleable.

We each selected the loose parts we wanted and got to work creating our model, and look what we created! A hedgehog using the wooden sticks.

Others used the wooden sticks to make candles for a birthday cake.

We also created a robot, adding detail with paper straws.

We used the corks and wooden letters to make clay people.

We worked together to share our ideas and inspire each other.

We used our fine manipulative skills to select and place buttons onto our clay as part of our design process.

We even used the clay tools and loose parts to extend our mark making skills.
We learn best when we are having fun through play.
I wonder what will be at our clay station tomorrow?