Another busy term which passed very quickly and once again I am behing in the blogging department but will try and catch you all up on what happened for us.
At the end of term one Chrissy and I attended a very exciting workshop around working with clay and as we have wanted to provide more opportunities for children to work with this marvellous natural material we discussed with the other teachers ways in which this could be facilitated and in the end it was decided to set up a table in the art space along with displaying intersting pieces of pottery to provoke conversations with the children who visited the space.
Some children of course discovered the clay immediately while others took the whole term to find it and by this time we,the teachers, had noticed that we had some very exciting creations being made.We continued to only provide clay with little sponges as we wanted the children to experience and explore ways to work with clay and we also wanted to introduce what we called clay speak. Terms such as rolling, coiling, pushing, squeezing, pancake making as for us this wis what working with clay is all about. When one introduces more tools etc into the mix some children never really touch the clay.
The interest continued until nearly the end of the term with children returning time and time again and bringing their ideas, their current interest such as making dinosaurs, birds, dragons just to name a few.
We were delighted with the extension of skills that we noted and the dispostions of persistence, resilence and and resourcefulness that the children showed. Certainly links were noticed to Guy Claxton's dispositions identified in his book 'Building Learing Power". Yeah. Fantastic.
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