Making medals with air-drying clay or playdough is a great hands-on activity for the kids! Shelly has written about the fun her son had making his own medals during the Tokyo Olympics in this guest post.
Making Medals With Air-drying Clay or Playdough
By Shelly
With all our talking / learning about the Olympics we thought it would be fun to make our own medals. My son really enjoyed working with the air drying clay when we did the nature imprints so we thought we would make our medals with more of the air drying clay.
A useful tip for air drying clay: once the kids have finished their craft, if you have some of the clay left over, wrap it up tight with cling film and it will last until your next crafting project. If it feels a little dry when you open it up again, just add a few drops of water and knead it in.
He started by taking small balls of the clay and then squishing them flat with his hands. You could also use a roller for this but I like the kids using their hands as it is a great sensory activity. Once he had the rough shape, he used the back of a paint brush to create the hole at the top for the string to go through. Then he carved out the numbers and adding a bit of decoration to each medal.
Working on his first medal
I know you are suppose to just have the first three positions, but as we are a family of four we decided we would have medals for the top 4 places!
Our clay medals drying
And then we left ours on a tray to dry.
Once they were dry we just added some string so we could hang the medals up.
Our completed clay medals
It is really an easy craft but my son enjoyed making the medals and I liked the fact that he did some more clay work.
If you don’t have air drying clay you could also use playdough. Activity Village has a great playdough recipe to make your own if you don't have any to hand! Here is an example.
Playdough medals
In this case we used 2 different colours of playdough so that the numbers stand out. We also used the end a paintbrush to form the hole at the top.
I really like the look of the colourful playdough medals and if you have younger kids who are learning their numbers, getting them to create the numbers with playdough is a great activity.
And if you have even younger kids they could always just represent the number on the medal – possibly using some dots.
Playdough medals with dots
If you do both sets, you could then have a matching activity! Match the medal with the dot to the medal with the correct number...
Whether you are using some air drying clay or playdough making a few medals is a fun “messy” activity, perfect for some Olympic themed fun. And we have even more ideas for making medals here!
1st place medal
This is a guest post from Shelly. Shelly is a home educating parent of two children aged 10 and 12. She blogs at ofamily learning together where she shares ideas on the different learning activities that they do including lots of hand-on maths, arts and crafts and anything else that is part of their home educating lifestyle.
You can find more guest posts by Shelly, and a list of all our guest posts, here.
