Ceramics: Tea Sets and Masks

It's taken us a while, but our first three projects in my ceramics electives have finally been finished up.  We started off the year with pinch pot tea cups, moved to coil tea pots (to make a set), and then we did slab masks.  This covered the three basic hand-building skills and of course, wedging and scoring and slipping.

I am doing my best to make my assignments as open ended as possible.  I mentioned in my previous post that I am moving towards TAB in my elementary room, and I'm also experimenting with it a bit in the high school room.  Now, the electives are a bit harder to leave open ended in terms of choice of material, so I am doing my best to make the assignments as open ended as possible.  In the beginning, it was sort of hard to think up assignments that are open-ended, but it's getting easier and easier as we go.

To make our slab masks, I gave students a variety of mask forms to choose from to slump their slabs over.  They were required to give their mask a theme, and to think about texture.  The lion mask above?  That right there is the first 100 I've ever given on an assignment!  The pictures literally give it no justice.  I'm loving that my students are thinking outside the box, too, with their surface decoration.  Our district's mascot is a cougar, so one of my volleyball players made a cougar mask and meticulously glued in fishing twine to the whisker holes she made.  It literally took her 2 1/2 class periods to hot glue those babies into the holes.  So awesome!

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The tea cups and tea pots were two separate assignments but they had to go together.  Students were required to make four identical shaped tea cups (though surface decoration could vary a bit based on the theme).

I've got more to come after this!  Our current two projects that are being finished up are ceramic shoes (life size!) and chia pets. :)

Studio Art: Coil Pots

This coil pot project was the last project in my Studio Art ceramics unit.  These have finally all been finished up and glazed fired.  For this project, students were required to make a simple vessel.  It did not have to hold liquid.  What they did have to show was movement through the vessel through the use of their coils.  Some did a really awesome job showing movement, while others didn't seem to understand.  Next year, if I repeat this project, I feel I will have to do a better job explaining movement.

Students used plain coils, spiraled coils, braids, and many other coil techniques to create these.

Love this one!  One of the best ones1

The one on the left has an awesome variety of coils!  No so much movement, but definitely creativity in the types of coils that were used.

The brown glaze with the blue specks is amazing on this piece!  I only wish this person would have coordinated the rest of their glaze choices to match that glaze a little better...

After I sit back and review these pieces, I see a need for me to better teach color choice.  As far as I can tell, these students haven't really had much training on color theory.  My current elementary curriculum teaches basic color theory in kindergarten (primary and secondary colors), reviews it in places as they move up, and touches very heavily on it in 5th grade, so hopefully my current students will have a better ability to choose colors as they move up.  As I look forward into next year, I think that I will incorporate a color theory unit early on in the school year, perhaps during my first unit of "What is Art?".