Paralympic Medal-Making: A raw idea to modify

Right. It's long been my aim to use this space for practical purposes as well as sounding off, and as I can't seem to keep up with the astonishingly prolific output of assorted nonsense from Michael Gove and his pals, I have decided now is as good a time as any to share an idea or two that I have used in the classroom. The ideas may be terrible. They may be helpful. They may be things you've already tried and done better. I'm going to try this anyway, and hopefully it will evolve positively.

My debut post on this theme relates to the Olympics/Paralympics. A few months ago, while looking at the education workshops on offer at Wimbledon Tennis Museum, I had a choice between two activities. Players in Action (based on sculpture) and Ceramic Medal-Making. I went with the first one, but always fancied the idea of the medals, too.

Eventually I plucked up the courage to do medal-making in some form myself, using an old reserve of air-dry clay that my TA managed to rescue from some dusty recess of the stock cupboard. Apparently we are more into paint and pastels when it comes to DT at my school.

To my amazement, the lesson worked well- far from a given when it comes to me leading Art/DT lessons. I would say I'd been deskilled owing to having specialist teachers but I don't think I was particularly skilled up in the first place.

So here's what we did, and what I might do with my next class (with some improvements).

1. Research.

The Olympic topic was all part of a test-run for our new creative curriculum. So we kicked off with some History-related investigations of previous Olympic medal designs. This was great, because it prompted all sorts of discussions about Roman numerals and the Greek language. We also had a look at some real medals the children had won:

2. Test illustrations. In the back of their Topic books (designed to include everything we covered about Olympics) the children practised drawing the tricker bits of the designs- leaves, silhouettes of athletes etc.

3. Design. Inspired by the range of medals they had seen, children then designed their own medal and sketched it in pencil in their books.

4. Creating it. I hadn't had time to really test this out beforehand, so imagine my amazement (and theirs) when my demonstration actually worked.
-We used about two tubs of clay, each one a round slab (a bit like cheese). I used a sharp knife to slice the clay into slabs about 1.5cm thick and about 13.5x13.5cm in width/length. We used the GLS stuff- it was all we had. Example of tubs:

- Using pre-cut circles of plain paper (I used the inside circle of a cellotape roll to create a template and then cut them out), the kids shaped the clay into a round shape.

- Then it was out with the Topic books and they etched their designs onto the clay. A standard school pencil worked fine and the clay didn't ruin the pencils for later use, either.

We left them to dry, and within 24 hours they were pretty solid- but they were brittle (it was the last two days of term and there was no time to put glaze on or anything like that), so be extremely careful.

If nothing else, they made great pictures as a record: