Clay is an essential part of our educational learning spaces as we view this as another expressive language for our children to engage with no matter their age. It is widely present within our rooms and is proposed to the children in a variety of ways.
One day we decided to transform our dry hard broken pieces of clay that we had carefully collected up over the past few months and repurpose them. We created a context where the children had the suggestion of adding water to these clay pieces in the hope of them being able to create a soft malleable paste.
The children thoroughly enjoyed this procedure as they carefully sprayed a fine mist over theses broken clay pieces, and over time were able to mix and experiment during this process with this new and ever-changing consistency.
This newly generated liquid form of clay, we found, offered a new perspective and allowed the children to investigate the clay as a two dimensional medium. They immediately understood how to interact with it as a mark making means, using the different techniques and tools that were already familiar to them from when they have used paint.
Throughout this experience the children had the opportunity to discover and construct their own connections between the clay and paint as a mark making medium as they were taking prior knowledge of known elements and creating these new connections.
