Imperial China on Paper Plates!

While one of my 6th grade classes began a Greek unit in art class and in Social Studies, the other class did a short unit on Ancient China.  Now, this project was originally going to be a two-project unit, however due to my shortage of clay, this is going to be a one-project lesson instead, and now this class will move onto Greek Art as well, as they are currently learning about the Ancient Greeks in Social Studies.

I previously saw this lesson floating around on Pinterest, which linked back to My Adventures in Positive Space.  I've also seen a few where teachers have their students draw and cut out vase shapes.  I decided this would be a good way to review the radial symmetry the students learned about in our Mexican Folk Art unit.

The focus of this project was to be able to identify the characteristics of Chinese porcelain, describe and create an artwork with radial symmetry, and mix various tints and shades of blue.  These are a few of the finished project, and just about everyone seemed to grasp the concept of radial symmetry by this point.

When we get back from February break, this group will begin the Greek unit with the scratch art Greek pottery.  My other 6th grade group will continue their Greek unit by learning about Greek architecture and will then design and draw a Greek temple using value.

6th Grade: Mexican Folk Art Mirrors

I just finished up (finally) with the Mexican art unit with my 6th graders.  The last project in the unit, after the Day of the Dead skull masks, was Mexican folk art mirrors.

Metal working was something new for me, so it was kind of exciting for me!  I taught the students how to do repousse and chasing to create radial symmetry on their mirrors.  In order to speed up the process, I have them use mosaic stickers for the mirror frame.  I'm not too happy with the quality of these, but we needed to move on with this project.  My superintended came in yesterday for some supplies and mentioned the same thing (which was a little embarrassing ..but she understood my reason for doing it).  They didn't really do a good job of creating a pattern/picture with the mosaics.  I think this was just pure laziness as I had made an example of a mirror to show them and we extensively looked at various examples of folk art mirrors in a power point...oh well.  Most of them at least understood what radial symmetry was!

Either way, what this has told me about my units that I created over the summer is that I may need to create less complex projects for the first project in each unit so that I can get through them faster.  We'll see how the next one goes...