The Water Clay

Thursday (17/03/2011)

a) Kids guess.
• I asked why the dinosaurs went extinct. Kwoong Yong said because a volcano erupted and the dinos died. Most kids gave the same answer. However, Qian Joe said; a big thing from space came shooting into the Earth.
• He was right. Another theory was because a huge shooting star called the “Asteroid” shot into planet Earth billions of years ago. The Earth burnt and then the hot air rose to the air which later blocked the sunlight shining through the Earth. Thus, the Earth became extremely cold. Plants died, animals died too; the stronger dinosaurs killed the weaker ones for food which eventually left with none at all. However, geologists found their fossils which gave us ideas of dinosaurs looks.

b) Reptiles.
• Dinosaurs belonged to the reptile family. The land dinosaurs as well as the enormous sea lizard “Icythysaurus” and the flying dinosaur “Pteranodon”. After their disappearance, other reptiles too have appeared. Among were lizards, crocodiles, snakes, tortoises, turtles and etc because they have same characteristics including scaly skin and lay eggs.

c) The Clay Story
• I brought in dino toys and out them surrounding a cardboard volcano to demonstrate the shooting star version of story. I used green clay to make into trees. It was fascinating and the kids thought that it must be fun playing with clay.

d) Our Water Clay
• We were supposed to make dinosaurs friends,; the reptiles. Surprisingly, nobody asked for making dinosaurs. Instead, they asked if they could make other water animals. I allowed.
• I cut cardboards into waterfall, ponds, lakes, rivers, seas and oceans while the kids made various types of animals out of green and red clays. They were so happy that Chun Kit and Zhi Feng said “Thank you, teacher for letting us play clay”.
• I didn’t give them the mould because I wanted to see their creativity. The younger ones would observe the older kids’ artwork and improved from there. The output included tadpoles, tortoises, turtles, starfish, Guppy fish, sting ray, volcano, island, fish food, submarine and also the giant octopus.