As part of the Discovery Museum’s Music and Art month, we’re excited to give kids the chance to get their hands dirty “throwing” clay on a potter’s wheel during the March 8 “Twilight Thursday.” Join us at 5:30 when Bob Nichols from the Allan Hancock College art department brings his wheel and demonstrates to kids what it’s like to take a lump of clay and turn it into a useful object, a work of art, or something that’s both.
Making household objects like pots and other containers has been something humans have been doing with clay or mud for generations. It’s an important element of human growth to be able to store and contain food and other resources for future use. Sometime around 4000 BC, Sumerian people in Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) developed a round platform on which they could easily turn their mounds of clay, making them more round and seamless. It would take many more millennia to get to the potter’s wheels we’re familiar with today, but that simple turning platform was a milestone in human artistic achievement.
All school-aged kids are invited, as always, to our Twilight Thursdays programs. Space is limited, and project participation is first come, first served.
Contributed by Kelly White O’Neill, executive director at the Discovery Museum. Discovery Corner is a weekly column in the Sun, highlighting events, science activities, and more for the Santa Maria Valley Discovery Museum at 705 S. McClelland in Santa Maria. Send comments to discoverycorner@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 8-15, 2012.