I am quickly adding one more “must have” to my bottomless homeschool supplies list, which already includes glue sticks, butterfly paper fasteners (I call them brads, but my sister Sara says nobody else does), whiteboard markers… and now, CLAY. (seriously, gift certificates to Staples or Michael’s are probably a great gift item at any time of year!!!)
It seems that there is no end to things we can do or make or learn with clay. The kids love it, too. Way more than I do, because it dries on your fingers and makes them all stiff and DRY. Ugh. I just touch it as little as possible (I discovered we could cover the layer of clay with plastic wrap while rolling it out!).
They used to have clay at Dollarama – just a blob of plain natural clay for $1, which is all I figure it’s worth. But I bought the last two packs of it I found and they seem to have replaced it with a weird rubbery plastic thing that comes in a million bright colours… except CLAY-coloured, of course. It doesn’t dry hard, either; after a few days, it sort of turns into an eraser. Yuck.
Anyway, here are some bricks. They look more like Chiclets; they are not very uniform bricks. This is a Story of the World Activity Book project to go along with the Indus Valley civilizations (Harappan cities, including Mohenjo-Daro). The second part of the project is to build houses, wells, gates etc with the bricks and maybe glue them together into some kind of structure.
I think this post is here more to prove that we’re still doing history than that we’re doing it WELL or anything like studiously. However, with Yom Kippur and Sukkos almost upon us, it may be a couple of weeks before we can continue in the book.
(here’s what one better homeschool family than ours did with the same project)
I call "butterfly paper fasteners" brads, too. And so does a whole community of scrapbooking enthusiasts, as far as I can tell.
ReplyDeleteMy older boys (7 and 4.5) LOVE clay, too. We make playdough to use, especially for my 2 year old, but clay that dries hard is always a big hit. The lightweight crayola "clay" is fun to play with, but doesn't fully harden. Don't make sukkah decorations with it because it will melt and drip garish colors all over everything if it rains. ;)
ReplyDeleteAnd by the way, I call them brads, too!
Ha! See??? I *knew* I didn't make it up. She got so peeved, I figured I was just hallucinating the name. :-o
ReplyDeleteI call them brads too, I didn't know they had another name :)]
ReplyDeleteWe haven't done clay in a very LONG time.