Visit Four: Animal Classification (Part II)
Day 2
We had already planned and drawn out our new creatures, and so today we dived into the clay. The students were very excited about today's lesson. We divided the clay between every student, so each ended up with a good 3 inch diameter ball. We spend 15 minutes or so going over some molding techniques. First I had them just play with the clay for a minute to loosen it up. Then I had them roll it into a sphere, then roll it into a log. Then I gave them each a tool to scrape with; a short plastic skewer. They played with scoring and tracing in the clay, and got a feel for how to draw finer designs.
Having children practice manipulating the clay.
First grader muscles are a little small for this!
After introducing these kids to modeling clay, I learned a few things that worked, and a few things I wish I would have done better:
-Make sure to practice making logs, and tell the children that they cannot cult anything that is smaller/thinner than their pinky finger. I had a number of children who made thin arms or feathers, which of course broke (See "glue guns" for the next visit!)
- Give a demonstration on connecting two pieces together... help them see that they cannot just place a piece on top of another and have them dry together.
- Explain to them the idea of 3D. A lot of these students began making their animal in a 2D fashion on their desks, so flat that we couldn't pry it off and they had to re-do it.
- I used toothpicks and googley eyes to add to the character of these animals, and it ended up working really well. I had lots of claws, and fun character! (Make sure to explain if they are using the eyes, they need to make eye lids to fold down on top of them to keep them in the socket.)
I saw this and HAD to take a picture of it! How much character comes into the clay when you have eyes. I love the wrinkly skin and the scowl. This is Nebula, space animal that eats planets.
Here's an example of an animal that will break upon drying! I had her remove the long branches for the nest and she added 4 more baby birds in the nest!
My favorite little Lava Germ.
She only used the pink eyes!
Dinosaur Peacock in the making. I had to ask her to reinforce the feathers with toothpicks so that this guy didn't crumble!
Terodon comes to life! This was one that I just knew would fall apart... but it was SO COOL!
I was so impressed by how these animals turned out. The kids really unleashed their creativity and created some really interesting new animals. This was my favorite day in Mrs. Ackley's class because I really felt that art was being made. Sometimes it's hard to measure the worth of "art" in children's skill or content knowledge. However, today I saw how important creativity was for the children and how they are each artists. You can find the link to the lesson plan on the Visist Three introduction to this activity.
