Clay Nest for a Mom Who is the Best!

Kindergarten students created these little clay nest with our Art Teacher Swap.  in 2015, I posted about different clay nests (click here).  This year, I simply didn't have time to paint the little eggs, so we packaged them up as is and sent them home to mom.

The nest had the students initials on the bottom but K's don't seem to understand what that means.  To set up for clay, I had labels made and they were placed on a sheet of paper. That way, when the kids were finished, they would place their nest on their name and a volunteer would write their initials on the bottom of the nest.  I used this for distributing as well.  I had to line up the name with the nest so I could call each student by their name to work on the nest as the rest of the class was doing stations.

I prepared these little cards before the students came in on tag board.  I used rubber bands to place them on the packaging.  The bands wrapped around the tissue paper to hold it all together.

Each student would come up to the table that I was working at and sign their name to a card.  They would talk about the clay and how it had changed.  They could hold it and experience the hard, rough little next and smooth eggs. It was so much fun to have that one on one time with each K to watch their eyes light up as they discovered what happens to clay, how it changes, and what it feels like after being fired. 

One of the things that I was sure to do when talking about these nests was offer the opportunity to make these for their mom .  I know that there are some students who don't have a Mom at all in my K classes so I didn't call this a Mother's Day gift and I had extra cards with no writing on them if they wanted to give these to someone else. I did have all students wrap them up because it kept the eggs all together and made it a little more safe to travel home with.

The packaging turned out so sweet... I simply packed them all up and sent them back to the homeroom teacher to distribute on Friday.  K's were very excited to bring home these treasures to their Moms. 

I saw this Instagram post from mrsnashgnarra. I thought it would b e a perfect card for next year to pair up with the clay nests. I might try to incorporate something like that or I have done this nests before with great success! This would have been a nice one to pair up with this project as well (click here)