Madri Ophoff
Ancient clay pot art
We visited a museum where one of the displays were on iron age settlements and had a lovely display of iron age pots. We looked at all the different decorative patterns made in the clay. What could possibly have been available for the people who made the pots to make such decorations? What natural objects could have been available to them to use?
We created 2 dimensional pot shapes to decorate as iron age artists using air dry clay.
We first rolled out the clay and either cut a free hand shape or placed a paper template of a pot on the rolled clay to cut around. For smaller kids I would let them draw the shape lightly on the rolled out clay using a pencil and cut their shape for them. We collect some natural objects like stones, shells, bones, sticks, grass etc and used these to decorate the clay pot shape. Trying to create different patterns with our natural objects by pressing these lightly into the clay.
We showed our pot shapes to each other and told our friends what we used to create the different patterns on our pots and also tried to guess what they used on theirs.
We left the pots to dry completely for a day or 2.
