We welcomed our young, juicy, straight-out-of-the-SUSS-womb freshmen and kickstarted the new semester with an Explorers @ Makerspace session on clay and play-doh! With three stations brimming with various opportunities and affordances, them being the clay station, play-doh station and the ‘Make Your Own Clay’ station that will leave Dr Sally blushing, we quickly got to playing, experimenting and discovering with all 33 senses of our bodies (yes, we have more than 5, go google it).
Nicklas be acting cute for the camera. Slay queen.
What a better way to start the play other than making a mess! and possibly venting out some inner frustrations🫣 With for sure no intentions of outdoing Jackson Wang (Pollack) with his specialty of singing (abstract art), we took any possible type of clay and material we had and created the absolute masterpiece you can see below!
take a look at our Jackson Wangs masterpiece
Joleen took the experience a step further (literally) when exploring with her self made wet clay, using her feet!
Joleen and the Chocolate Factory
Oh look close! Who’s that Pokemon? It’s a wannabe mechanic. It’s Ayub, arriving from the block like J.Lo, attempting to create tools to help the other participants with their clay explorations. He tried converting the toy sanitising machine (which you might find in your own preschool) into a kiln which worked surprisingly well as you can see in Figure 1 below. Some were creations made from clay, some play-doh and some from clay created using a bunch of random substances like corn starch, water, oil and shaving foam.
Figure 1. Heating up clay with the toy sanitising machine in ‘drying’ mode.
As expected of the varying properties of the different creations, some dried quickly (to the point it cracked so much, Maybelline can’t help), some took a few hours to harden, while some didn’t at all. And that’s ok! We learnt about what worked and what didn’t as we went.
Ayub also tried to fashion a makeshift pottery wheel out of a tray taped onto an old bicycle tyre. Safe to say, it’s no wonder the ancient Greeks like Socrates and Pythagoras didn’t convert their old Ofo bike tyres along the streets of Athens into pottery wheels when Ofo went bankrupt. Even the great philosopher of our time herself, Snowi, undertook this Sisyphean task but to no avail.
The wheel spun too slowly and jankily and the tray was too wonky. It was a good attempt with the larger loose parts laying around the Makerspace.
Knead, pinch, twist, fold, spin, paint — you name it, we’ve done it. Our explorers put their fine-motor skills into the gauntlet as they dove headfirst into the squishy, squelchy world of clay and play-doh. The joy of pressing fingers into soft dough, the satisfaction of seeing a shape take form, and the pure fun of getting hands dirty in the name of creativity. Absolutely fun stuff.
It is not easy moulding clay into a horse and carriage while making plans to overthrow Lawrence Wong, Nicklas.
Nicklas’s. The attention to detail was so mind-blowing that you’d think he’s been sculpting since the Stone Age.
A very demure, very mindful flower
Our completed works! 🎨✨
Here’s us getting our hands dirty at the ‘Make Your Own Clay’ station! 🌟 Check out our creative experiments as we whipped up our own clay from scratch — some dry, some wet, and some delightfully slimy…
Some other snapshots of the fun we had... 📸✨
Liyana, maybe rethink that choice. Don’t think play-doh is in the Healthy Plate.
Nice ashtray Hui Xin.
Maybe an E@M session is not the best place to fight for women’s rights.
Till next time! with love❤️,
Hui Xin, Joy & Ayub
Comments