Today was our first Family Clay class, and it was dino-riffic! :-) Daegan has done a bit of work with clay in some of the art classes he’s taken, and asked to do a clay class with Mom or Dad. Well, this is even better: a class all four of us could take together. We had to wait until now to start, though, as the youngest age they accept is 4. Gareth made the cut-off by a few weeks.

In today’s class we put clay over top of an upside-down nylon/mesh-wrapped bowl to build a landscape—“like a beach, a forest, a desert…whatever your favourite type of place is” said the teacher. Right away Daegan starts getting upset as all he wants to build are dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures. So I asked him, “Are you going to build a Jurassic or a Cretaceous landscape?” and he merrily went to work. Jim worked with Gareth, who also opted to make a prehistoric landscape.

We made dinos, snails, fossils, dinosaur nests and eggs, palm trees, crocodilians, leaves (imprints with a stamp), an elasmosaur (sea creature), prehistoric bugs…all the while Daegan is chattering away and amazing everyone within earshot with his knowledge of all things prehistoric. Racking my brains for other creatures to make, I asked Daegan if I should make a trilobite. “No,” he laughed, “This is the Cretaceous, and trilobites went extinct in the Permian.” Ah, yes. Silly me.

But then disaster. “It’s time to take our worlds off the bowls,” the teacher said. “You cut around the bottom with a knife, like this [which was going to wreck a number of fossils Daegan had carved into the clay], dig your fingers underneath and lift it off. Decide if you want your world to be flat, in which case squish it down, or rounded [in which case you were to stuff the base with newspaper].” Ack! I had no idea we would be taking it off the mold in this way—I thought perhaps we snipped the mesh, slipped it off the bowl, and the mesh would just disintegrate in the kiln. I made the base much too thin to be lifted easily, and we had so many creations on it. In the end, the only way to get it off at all was to cut in into three large pieces, wrecking lots of what Daegan had worked so hard to make. “You’ve got 10 minutes to fix it up,” we were informed, but it was too late. Daegan was in full meltdown mode.

So I whisked him out of the room, and tried and tried to calm him down. Working on keeping his emotions in check is one of Daegan’s on-going projects…and the same for me. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I tried various approaches and in the end, found one that worked. Daegan was able to calm himself and finish his project, clean up his spot in the classroom, and otherwise end the day on a good note.

So what was it that worked? An analogy. I talked about how in art, as in life, sometimes things happen that you can’t control, and it helps to learn to ‘go with the flow’. This got me nowhere at first. Me: “Let’s go in and draw some new fossils and imprints and make the best of it.” Daegan: “But it won’t be the same! It’s ruined!” Oy! I talked about how maybe a small asteroid had hit our world and shook things up, or maybe we started with Pangaea and now the world was breaking up…still no dice. But then I said, “It’s like when you mix colours. If you start with red and yellow, and they accidentally get mixed, you could call it a mistake and get all upset. Or you could say, “Wow. That made orange. I didn’t mean to make orange, but it’s not going to do me any good to say, “Put it back to red and yellow!” I’ll just have to make the best of it.” Success!

Daegan calmed down, started talking about how that would work with other colours too, like red and blue and purple, and that yes…I guess art is like that, Mom. It was good for me to see his upset, though, as other teachers had mentioned to me that he seemed to get very upset and frustrated at times, and they really didn’t know how to help him. Well, no kidding. Talking about colour combining isn’t going to work to calm down too many kids!

Looking forward to painting our world next week after it has been fired in the kiln. Hope to have some pictures to share then.