7 January 2019
When we began our unit on Celebration at the end of October, preparations were well underway some 3,000 miles away for one of the most popular festivals in the Hindu calendar. Whilst Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, is foreign to myself and most of my students, we learned that there are many similarities between how people celebrate this and other harvest festivals throughout Asia, including the locally celebrated Mid-Autumn Festival. The festivities passed in November, but we continued working away to sculpt highly decorative clay lamps used in celebrations and rituals of Diwali.
For their unit on Celebration, Year 6s learned about diyas, clay oil lamps used in India and Nepal to celebrate Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. They considered the motifs, patterns and formal qualities of ornamental diyas and recorded their observations in their sketchbooks, which informed their creative designs for their own sculpture. In working with clay, students used the pinch pot technique and learned some of the basics of ceramic forming techniques, including kneading and joining with crosshatches and slip. Once their air drying clay sculptures had fully dried, they referenced their design sketches to apply finishing colours to their pieces.
