Inside the Art Room

Clay explorations begins in Kindergarten with texture exploration! Students learn about texture you can feel with your skin as well as visual texture, or texture you know with your eyes. Students use a variety of tools to create textures in the moist clay, paint the pieces with clay paints or colored slip, and they are fired in the kiln at 1,888 degrees!

Check out a fun song about Texture here!

Inspired by the book, Clay Mates, by Dev Petty & Lauren Eldridge, our youngest artists tried their hand at building creatures out of modeling clay. Students could choose anything to create, with or without googly eyes! Once the creations were complete Emily Arrow lead us in the ClayMates sing along and then came the story telling! Students were asked to work in table groups to come up with story that included all of the characters at the table. The stories must have a beginning, middle and end with each character having a part to play! What kind of story could you make with an octopus, a puppy, and a baby eagle?

Read the story ClayMates here.

Sing along with Emily Arrow here.

The story that inspired this clay lesson was a Chinese folktale called, The Empty Pot. It tells the story of Ping, a boy who loves to grow things. However, when the Emperor asks al the children to grow a flower from special seed, Ping finds that his seed will not grow. He must present the Emperor with an empty pot. Students are asked to explain the lesson hidden in the story and to explain how they came to identify its secret message. Then students make their own empty pot.

Students learned how to create a clay pot by rolling a ball, opening the pot, and pinching the sides until they have the desired shape. Once students created their pot, they were painted with colored slip, a form of watered down, colored clay. Around here we call them Clay lady Paints. Once the pots were leather hard, students learned how to Sgraffito. The word sgraffitois Italian for scratch. Student's scratched designs into the colored slip to reveal the white stoneware clay underneath. The results were beautiful!

Learn more about sgraffito here.

Read the The Empty Pot.

Inspired by clay artist James DeRosso, artists constructed clay vessels with expressive faces. They learned the basics of clay construction to create pinch pots or slab constructed cups. Then students embellished the creations with facial features by rolling, pinching, scratch & slipping clay bodies together. The pieces were glazed and kiln fired. Students learned that the shape and scale of the facial features, as well as the position of the features helps to communicate feeling and expression.

Learn more about artist James DeRosso here.

*B-week rotation also worked on weaving missed during the snow week in February.

This lesson challenged students to reframe the story, Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak, to explore characters left out or marginalized by the narrator. Students created their own wild things complete with a back story and 3-D environment which they used to tell their character's story. Students presented their stories and offered an opinion on how each featured wild thing would feel about Max's visit. Students discovered that these wild things were not so terrible after all!

Read Where the Wild Things Are here.

Email: tina.atkinson@mnps.org
Website: percypriest.org
Location: Percy Priest Elementary School, Otter Creek Road, Nashville, TN, USA
Phone: 6152988416