Clay activities have provided us with a variety of lifelong memories dating back to our childhood. It’s not just about being creative and making different shapes; there’s a lot more to it. Kindergarteners are a group of young minds who have just recently taken their first steps into the educational and real-world, thus they must participate in learning activities that will help them grow into creative and talented individuals.
Therefore this article discusses the benefits and some basic clay arts for kids through which you can create a fun and educative environment for your little star.
Benefits of Clay Activities
Clay arts for kids have many benefits apart from the fun engaging activity. It has a great role in the early childhood education and mental development of a kid. Let’s find out all the benefits of clay activities for kindergarten.
1. Hand-eye Coordination Skills
In certain actions like catching a ball or pouring juice into glass requires the capacity to conduct these activities simultaneously using both our hands and eyes. This skill is known as hand-eye coordination and it is a neurological process. Clay art for kids plays a major role in improving this skill as kids spend so much time making clay models.
2. Creativity
Have you ever noticed that the clay models kids make each time is different or improved from the earlier clay models? Being imaginative and creative is a skill that is highly prized nowadays. Clay activities for kindergarten are good methods that allow your child to express his imagination by creating various clay items to his liking.
3. Fine Motor Skills
Clay creates friction that strengthens the tiny muscles of the hands and promotes arch movement in the hands, allowing for longer durations of colouring and writing. Fine motor skills are important in good writing too. Clay art for kids promotes different hand movements.
Also read: Easy Crafts to Do at Home: Let’s Learn How to Fold Papers Creativity?
Clay Activities for Kindergarten
Clay for kids art is a fun and enjoyable activity. While playing with clay make sure that your little one doesn’t mix different colours of clay as it can change the colour of the entire clay. Given below are a few basic clay arts for kids.
1. Birthday Cake
This is a simple clay art for kids that don’t need much time and effort. Only a few colours are used in this activity.
- Instruct your child to place a tray on the table. Take a handful of yellow clay.
- Create a circular shape by softly flattening it. It should be placed on the tray. This will be the cake’s foundation.
- Make a thin, elongated piece out of green clay. Use the green clay to create a border around the edge of the circular yellow foundation. Gently flatten it.
- Collect some white, pink, and purple play-dough. Demonstrate how to roll it into tiny balls to your child. To make a cluster, arrange the balls in the centre of the cake.
- Birthday cakes are incomplete without candles. For that roll out some white clay and use yellow clay to create the flame. As in every birthday cake, the candle should be placed in the cake’s centre.
Tadaa! Your clay birthday cake is ready.
Also read: 5 Minutes Crafts for Kids: How Your Kid can Use Their Time While Being Creative
2. Butterfly
It is one of the basic clay arts for kids that every kid should know. Kids will be thrilled to see the final result of the clay activity.
- Take a handful of blue playdough and roll it out evenly.
- A larger portion of the playdough should be used for its body and a smaller one for the head.
- Carefully compress the body section. The head, on the other hand, must be circular.
- Spread out the pink play dough and divide it into four equal halves. The pieces must all be about the same size.
- Pick the pink balls and compress two of them to a larger size and two to a smaller size.
- And it is now time to start putting the wings and body together.
- Usually, butterflies’ upper wings are bigger. Therefore, for upper wings use larger pink pieces, while the bottom wings could be the smaller pink parts.
- In between pink wings, attach the body and head part.
- Design the wings with purple, orange, or yellowish coloured play-dough. Design it however your youngster wants.
- Make small miniature eyes out of white and black clay now. Attach them to the butterfly’s head.
Your beautiful butterfly is ready!
3. Caterpillar
This is another simple clay art for kids. For this model also they don’t need many colours.
- From white paper, cut out a leaf form. Toss in some crayons and have your youngster colour the leaves.
- Keep the leaf form aside after cutting it out. Take the green and brown playdough and combine them.
- After making circular balls, give kids the task of glueing these balls together in any colour pattern they like- same colour or alternative colour combination.
- For the face, create black clay eyes on the first ball because kids might be familiar with the eyes of a caterpillar that is black. Form a smiley-mouth form underneath the eyes with black thread or black clay.
- Kids might not have noticed the antennas of butterflies. For that, put two little sticks on the caterpillar’s head and cover the tips of each stick with a small red clay round to make antennae.
That’s it. Your clay caterpillar is ready!
Also read: Creative Work Ideas for Kids: A List of 5-minutes Fun Craft Project
Summing Up
Once kids understand the magic of creating wonders using clay they will start making different models every day. Therefore, encourage them to engage in such activities and also introduce new models to them that you used to make in your childhood days.
So, what are you waiting for? Let’s go ahead and let your kids’ imaginations go wild with these really cute and simple clay crafts to make, play with, and, of course, give as gifts to their friends!
