week 5-Intro To Clay- Amy

It is wonderful being back in the Art Studio at Children's Garden and a great gift to be working with Angelina and Kathryn. Clay is one of my favorite mediums to work in as a mixed media sculptor. This week I had the opportunity to meet most of the children and start a dialogue about clay.

We talked about how the clay feels in our hands; where clay come from; why it is different from the play-dough in their classroom; what happens when you add too much water and what happens when it is too dry. We used our hands to create spheres, coils and press the clay into different forms. We also experimented with different clay tools and rolled clay out into a flat slab. I demonstrated the "score and slip" technique and how to use clay slip as "glue" to join pieces of clay together.

Some of the children created small sculptures that will need to dry and be fired before they can be taken home. Others chose not to keep their work and just enjoyed the tactile experience of working with clay.

I'm looking forward to continuing the clay dialogue with the children on Mondays and excited to see where our imagination and creativity will take us.

Clay with Amy - Kathryn

Angelina and I have been joined by the third member of the studio team, Amy Laugesan, who will be working with clay with the children from each classroom on Mondays. This week she spent three days with us so that she could meet everyone, and get thoroughly integrated into our program. Amy was the studio teacher for a year in 2004, so she is familiar with Children's Garden and knows a great deal about working with children and art. We're excited to have her join us.

This week her objective was simply to introduce clay as a medium, and give the children some experience and vocabulary for what they did. Some now know about rolling clay into a long tube, and making a sphere, about using slip to stick pieces together, and something about the process of putting clay into a special oven to cook so that it is hard.
Loris Malaguzzi, the educator who lead the development of the Reggio Emilia approach, wrote about the hundred languages of learning, and meant by that the countless ways children express their ideas, their questions, their curiosity. Using clay is one language, as is drawing, as is using paint, as is dance, is singing - the list goes on and on! One by one, or two by two, we will continue to introduce different ways for children to tell us what they are interested in.