Clay Tiles

In this lesson, we learned how to use clay and how to create something out of it. We first learned how to get all the air out of the clay (which is extremely important if you are firing the clay). This involved kneading the clay and working it in your hands and throwing it down onto the table. Once we felt that most the cracks were smoothed out and clay was soft and workable, we rolled it into a slab and cut it into a square shape. We used the extra clay to create additives, where you add clay, and used a small tool to create subtractives, where you take away clay or create an indent. We also learned about scoring and slipping to add our clay pieces onto the tile. In order to do this, you created small scratch marks (scoring) on both the piece you want to stick and the piece you want to stick too. Then you add a small amount of water over scoring (slipping) and the two clay pieces will stick together. In order to complete the project, we had to have our initial on the tile, at least one additive and one subtractive and it had to have three things that describe us. Then we painted the clay when we were done.

 An extension activity for this lesson could be to use the clay to make recreations of different biomes in a science class. You could make a desert biome and create sand dunes, camels, and other desert animals and paint them.

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