Today's Lesson: In today's meeting with Cooper Home, students experimented with clay to create coil and pinch pots. The focus for this class period was to build and refine their pots so they would be ready to fire and paint for the next class period. The students were asked to consider what function their pot would serve as they built them. Teachers demonstrated to the class pinch pot building, coil building, handle pulling, and slip and scoring techniques to ensure proper connections of pieces to one another. The students explored the possibilities of what the clay medium is able to do in this class period. Essential Understandings:
Artists communicate ideas by creating art in a variety of ways
Artists will understand the clay medium and possibilities in 3-D art
Outcomes - Students will be able to:
Use techniques and tools in innovative ways to create a form
Create 3-D art that serves a function
Understand the abilities and limitations within the clay medium
Understand techniques to properly build a clay form ready for firing
Skills:
Identify different techniques to build a clay pot/form
Creative problem solving
Complete documentation of this lesson can be found by clicking the image below!
Reflection: What worked well for this art experience? Why? I thought this meeting with our students from Cooper Home went really well. Out of all of the meetings we have had with these students, I saw that students made the most individual choices in this art experience. We created coil and pinch pots with clay today, and all of the students displayed a different approach to make their pots. I saw how this related to our readings from the textbook Differentiated Instruction in Art and other readings addressing students making choices in the art room. Since our students took initiative in determining how to approach their clay pots, I noticed that student engagement level was quite high. In past meetings I noticed that a handful of students would finish early, but that wasn’t the case today since students were problem solving and trying new things to construct their pots. It was a great experience seeing firsthand how including student choices in art experiences actively engages them in the process. What didn’t work well for this art experience? Why? One thing that I noticed that didn’t work super well today was clean up. I’ve noticed that this was an issue with the last meeting with this group, and it popped up today. Both the last meeting and today involved art processes that created a fairly large mess and clean up lacked in both meetings. Today, the other teachers and myself had to be really persistent with having students clean up their areas. Clean up didn’t go as smoothly as I hoped. I think the biggest takeaway form these teaching experiences is to plan more extensively with how to clean up workstations and communicating clearly to students. For the future, I would consider giving students ‘jobs’ when comes time to clean up. For example, I could have a group of students sponge down tables, while other students collect extra clay, and having students clean tools in the sink. It really hasn’t worked well telling the students in general how to clean up, so it could be beneficial to have students do specific things in this part of the class. What would you do differently? Why? In today’s meeting I saw how excited and invested the students were when building their clay pots, but there never seems to be enough time. In my future as an educator when I have students work with ceramics, I would love to be able to split this art experience across multiple days. I think students would like to be able to build and refine their pots over a couple of class periods. Also, speaking technically, the clay would dry and become leather hard over a day or two and I think that would help the students trim down and smooth the surface of their pots with various tools. I know in my own experiences with ceramics, smoothing surfaces became easier once some moisture left the clay. Our time with the students of Cooper Home is very limited, so we work with the time available, but when I have my own teaching practice I would like to extend clay projects over multiple days. From this, I would be able to talk a little more in depth about some of the pottery terms and techniques that students could utilize in this unit.