3-D art

This week the kids took a museum class about sculpting with various media. Here's J's clay sculpture, which he says is Nim on the volcano (a scene from the movie "Nim's Island").





Zoo Boy shows off his clay sculpture, which is more of an exploration with the media (and various and assorted additional items) than a depiction of anything in particular. He was pretty proud of his creation regardless.









J's mobile sculpture, which he says depicts a person playing a board game -- in his words, the dice (on the left tyne) are rolled, and the board is divided up into night (middle tyne, with stars and moons) and day (right tyne, with brightly colored beads). Zoo Boy chose not to make a mobile (he wasn't interested in working with the twisted metal of the coat hanger for some reason, or so his teacher said).




Another sculpture by J, this one he says tells a Navajo story of how the Spider Woman taught the Navajo people to weave. Here is his discription: the rods in the middle are the loom, the Spider Woman is on one side, and she has four arms and four legs but only two eyes. I can't remember what he said the heroine's name was, but she's there too, being shown how to weave after having fallen into the Spider Woman's burrow. J says this all takes place in her underground cave, and eventually the girl leaves the burrow and goes back to her people, teaching them all the Spider Woman taught her.

I asked J where he heard this story -- it's a real Navajo story that I am quite familiar with, but I'm also fairly certain I haven't told it to him yet. He said that he read it at the library. The amazing thing to me is that we've not been to the library to read since the fall, possibly even longer than that. Yet his recall of the story -- which to my knowledge he's only read once -- was adequate enough for him to not only tell the story (with fairly decent clarity) to me, but also to sculpt a very representative scene from it.

(On a similar note, last week I overheard him telling a friend the folk tale "Milk and Eggs" that I read to the boys more than a year ago. Not only did he accurately tell the story, he also acted out key components from it. A quick, yet interesting, aside....)

Zoo Boy's sculpture in the same media type -- his is a mythical being of his own creation. He pointed out various body parts to me, but by the end I still couldn't tell head from tail (quite literally). But again, he was very proud of his creation.

I was pretty impressed that they had so much room for creative expression in so many different ways in just an hour long class!