Children and Clay

Clay is a malleable material and highly sensitive to manipulation. Thanks to its creative, exploratory, and transformative properties clay suggests ways of learning, stimulating the senses and imagination.

In conversations with clay children find they are the authors of marks and incisions, they explore clay materially, performing gestures and actions, producing unexpected effects, imitating companions, constructing together, and creating characters and objects that represent an idea, or a thought.

Teachers position themselves at the point of encounter between clay and children, ready to highlight the value of children’s tries, discoveries, and surprises.

What relations are we seeing and supporting in children’s sculptural-plastic explorations?
How does constructing with clay support other languages and vice-versa?

In this webinar we will try to answer these questions, and others, starting from experience here in Reggio Emilia.