STOP PRESS! I’ve finished writing all my book manuscripts for Stage 7 of the Little Learners, Big World decodable nonfiction series and it’s time to play – with clay! Hurray!
I shared in a previous post that every now and then I doubt my creativity with words. When it comes to creativity with clay, forget it! (Memories of my water buffalo sculpture exploding in the kiln at high school have come flooding back…)
The good news is that through writing the Stage 7.1 book Aiden’s Clay Lesson, the first title in Stage 7 of the series, I had ‘Aiden’ to ably guide me through the process of working with clay. I’ve outlined before the challenges of writing decodable books at the earliest levels. However, in 7.1 Book 1 (ai and ay), I not only had clay to play with, but also long vowels, syllables and a couple of quadgraphs! (4 letters representing 1 sound)
Aiden's Clay Lesson:
When brainstorming focus words for this book, play and clay were words that popped out to me straight away (sorry – I had to get at least one quadgraph for /ā/ in this post!) I came up the with idea of an instructional text about how to make a pinch pot using real clay – a text that could not only be read by our young readers but used for a fun and achievable art activity afterwards. Given the increased number of pages in the books from Stage 6 onwards, I also thought there would be room for a general introduction to clay, a brief look at the history of clay vessels and an overview of some ways to decorate them.
To add human interest and put the pottery students in safe pair of hands, I created pottery instructor Gail – who later became Aiden when we found a real-life male pottery expert to make the pinch pot in his studio (thanks Guy and Ceramiques Elsterwick!). Phew! No chance of the pinch pot exploding in the kiln – plain sailing ahead!
The Talk about it page at the back of the book offers a handy summary of the pinch pot process, and gives the children some information on glaze – the ‘paint’ used to decorate some clay pots. Hopefully the ‘More ways to play with clay’ will inspire children to get creative with clay. The Did you know? page (accessed via the QR code on the inside back cover of Aiden’s Clay Lesson) offers further fun facts about clay and can be used as a springboard for further scaffolded discussion. It also provides an idea for a simple writing activity, which draws on the pinch pot procedural text as a model.
I hope you have fun at Aiden’s clay lesson. I certainly had fun playing with /ā/!