Soapstone Carving at the Museum
My Gr. 4 class went to the Royal Ontario Museum yesterday for some lab work and a tour connected with their rocks and minerals unit in Science. The museum also offered us a free arts lesson for a pilot project they are introducing. Being our focus was rocks and minerals our arts lesson was on carving soapstone.
(Photo: Since I can't show the kids' faces I have lots of photos of carvings and hands, instead :).)
We were the very first class that they tried the soapstone carving workshop with and it was great, with the students highly involved, though we did have a few suggestions to put on the ROM's teacher evaluation forms at the end of the session.
Here's what the work tables looked like when we first arrived in the room. Each group of students got goggles that they had to wear, a series of files, rasps and nails for working the soapstone, plus sandpaper and water for smoothing the stone.
The sandstone came in a box, broken into irregular pieces and the students were able to pick the piece of their choice. I selected a very small sliver to make into a pendant, but I haven't really had much chance to work on it yet.
Most of the students picked much larger chunks of stone which is when the instructors discovered that their ambitions of having the kids make a sculpture with the time and tools given was a bit ambitious. Even a soft rock is challenging to work with, so one of the instructors had her hands full with the one saw they had for cutting chunks into smaller pieces.
We started to recommend to students that instead of carving the stone into a different shape that they study the sides of the shape they already had and choose one side for carving a relief, instead. It would leave them with a lovely natural-looking piece of art to take home with them.
We worried about some of the students' attention spans working on the stone for up to an hour, but the kids were highly involved and were reluctant to stop carving by the time we had to leave. Most of them took their sculptures home to finish there.
Another thing that we strongly recommended to the instructors is that they invest in a set of smocks for the classes coming in the future. The soapstone created a great deal of dust and powder!
Here's one girl wearing her goggles and working away on her soapstone piece with a file:
And here's what her soapstone relief looked like a few minutes later:
A very fun and creative project and it was great to have the kids seeing how effectively science and the arts can go together. We'd go back and do it again.
(Photo: Since I can't show the kids' faces I have lots of photos of carvings and hands, instead :).)
We were the very first class that they tried the soapstone carving workshop with and it was great, with the students highly involved, though we did have a few suggestions to put on the ROM's teacher evaluation forms at the end of the session.
Here's what the work tables looked like when we first arrived in the room. Each group of students got goggles that they had to wear, a series of files, rasps and nails for working the soapstone, plus sandpaper and water for smoothing the stone.
The sandstone came in a box, broken into irregular pieces and the students were able to pick the piece of their choice. I selected a very small sliver to make into a pendant, but I haven't really had much chance to work on it yet.
Most of the students picked much larger chunks of stone which is when the instructors discovered that their ambitions of having the kids make a sculpture with the time and tools given was a bit ambitious. Even a soft rock is challenging to work with, so one of the instructors had her hands full with the one saw they had for cutting chunks into smaller pieces.
We started to recommend to students that instead of carving the stone into a different shape that they study the sides of the shape they already had and choose one side for carving a relief, instead. It would leave them with a lovely natural-looking piece of art to take home with them.
We worried about some of the students' attention spans working on the stone for up to an hour, but the kids were highly involved and were reluctant to stop carving by the time we had to leave. Most of them took their sculptures home to finish there.
Another thing that we strongly recommended to the instructors is that they invest in a set of smocks for the classes coming in the future. The soapstone created a great deal of dust and powder!
Here's one girl wearing her goggles and working away on her soapstone piece with a file:
And here's what her soapstone relief looked like a few minutes later:
A very fun and creative project and it was great to have the kids seeing how effectively science and the arts can go together. We'd go back and do it again.