Exploring Clay Journal

As noted by Ms. Gwathmey as well as another student, clay is probably one of the most social art forms in a child’s classroom. It can even be appropriate and helpful if the teacher plays with clay alongside the students. This practice of doing art with your students can be stifling and inappropriate at times, due to the skill level of the teacher being too high and their role too powerful. Clay; however, is different, and it’s easier to have the emphasis not be solely on a ‘beautiful’ outcome.

Clay differs from other art forms such as painting or drawing because it is such a sensory experience. After squeezing the clay bocks between out fingers for just a few minutes, multiple people in the class noted how therapeutic it felt to squeeze their clay, especially after a long day of giving to others. Knowing this, clay could be used as a similar relaxing tool with students. Stress is universal, regardless of age, and perhaps this non-stressful, non-competitive art form could be worked into a daily schedule for students.

We began our clay experience with a slide show of various classroom and outdoor clay explorations with children. One of the first slides had a group of three and four year old children playing with mud. Apparently this is an important thing for ‘city kids’ to experience, seeing as they generally don’t come in contact with a lot of mud they are aloud to touch. Children who grow up in the country have far more opportunities to make mud pies and such. The slides highlighted different types of clay from natural deposits by the water, to mud, to play dough.

There are so many dimensional possibilities with clay. I knew this from previous clay experiences and noticed it concretely in the classroom when we were given time to ‘play’ with the clay. Some people rolled out the clay, others flattened and thinned it into petal-like structures, some made imaginary scenes, while others focused more on the squeezing and pinching and throwing down of the clay. We were given guidance and suggestions on the bulletin board and that made me think about how to motivate different age groups with the material. The material itself, rather than the creation should probably be the emphasis with younger kids, as is true with most art forms. Questions such as: how does it feel? What happens when you do this or that? Can you make a very small piece? Can you make a very large piece? What kinds of shapes can you make? The goal is to inspire rather than inhibit.