Winter Classroom Projects with Polymer Clay

This post is coming from Sculpey Teacher Ambassador, Betsy Madson,in Minneapolis Minnesota. A few ideas for projects I have created over theyears during the winter months through St. Patrick’s Day, will be what I am sharing in this post. I always explain tell the students their hands are their best and worst clay tools.  This is very hard for little guys to understand this concept because they love their creations with their whole heart, and they want to play with them and sadly their fingers will make their creations bumpy. One of my rules of thumb is to always have plenty of Sculpey III®, 1-pound blocks of white and black clay, these 2 colors are essential, white is often used to mix colors to lighten them and for some reason we tend to use lots of black.

One of my favorites is a LARGE snowman head bead, to wear on my ID lanyard for school in the winter.  Instead of the top hot we created berets for our snazzy snowman, the purpose of the beret was so that the hat would not break, it also made a nice surface to add some cute tiny holly.  The snowman represents winter and was a great project to stay away from specific holidays. Clay colors that was used for the project were: Translucent (we made a mistake selecting our color however, we decided that we liked the way it turned out and continued to use Translucent instead of White), Black – for eyes and mouth, Just Orange – for the nose and Lilac. The sample pictured is a recreation using White Sculpey III.

large snowman head bead made of polymer clay attached to lanyard

A great Valentine project students had fun making was a hanging flat heart shape and having the students press their thumb prints into the clay in a “V” shape than putting the heart on a string for the student to give their parents. 

When I first lead the students with this project the project worked really well, we used Silver Sculpey III. This time we used Candy pink and Glitter Pink, White, and Red-Hot Red this time. The kiddos used tools from the Sculpey Bake Shop® Magic Clay Mega Activity Set.

Lastly, I worked with a group of students to create St. Patrick’s Day projects, we made little pots of gold and put them in a “scene.”  They turned out super cute.  Colors of Sculpey III®: Black, Gold, Emerald Green.

In addition to the “pots of gold” students also created their St. Patrick’s Day unicorns, these little friends turned out adorable.  Students mixed the “green” to create just the perfect color for their unicorn.  Teaching students how to correctly mix colors was the point of the unicorn project.  As my students proclaim, nobody wants “bluck” when asked what bluck? My students will tell you just keep mixing colors together you will figure it out, I wonder where they heard that phrase!  We mixed Shamrock Green with White to come up with a soft minty green to make our unicorn.

The students’ projects will probably not turn out the same as yours however, whatever they create it will be adorable and the students will be so proud, maybe they will become that one student that collects all their projects and will proudly proclaim they have over 100 clay projects.

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