Clay work is a brilliant way of developing a very wide range of skills!
Clay is a very tactile material and the children love the sensory aspect of working with it. Manipulating the clay and using simple tools helps to strengthen fingers and to develop fine motor skills. The girls acquire new vocabulary and build upon their knowledge of materials as they talk about the changes they observe when their models dry. We also used mathematical language of size and shape as we cut our slabs of clay and formed our rectangles into cylinders!
The girls were very excited to paint and complete their wonderful alien creatures.
Our aliens were based upon the work of American artist James DeRosso. We really enjoyed looking at his ceramic monsters and watching him (on video) talking about his work as he created a new monster.
