Clay Animal Masks with 3rd Grade

                                   

Clay Necklaces: Medallions and Beads

Each year with Kindergarten we create these clay necklaces. Day one is all about making the medallion and the beads. You can see a student sliding the beads onto a kabob skewer. We use found objects to create textures in the big medallion. This is a step-by-step guided process. 

Once the beads have been fired in the kiln, the kids get to paint them with tempera paint. The super special surprise being that once they have painted all the white space on their beads, they get to rub gold paint on the surface. Messy day in art! But oh so fun. 

The gold paint takes these beads to whole new level. 

Day Three: We assemble our necklaces after a discussion on symmetry. I demonstrate how to lay out the beads and plan a design that's symmetrical. Below are my models. 

I tie the necklaces together for the students in a special way to ensure they don't fall off and beads don't scatter as they are walking down the hallway. We use "twisteez" wire for these and they're perfect! I love twisteez. I also lay out trays of plastic beads that they can use for 'spacers'. 

Once they finish their necklace, we work on a book page for the Art Book about butterflies and symmetry. In the photo above, you can see hints of that book page. The kids draw a "symmetrical" butterfly, outline in black marker and color with crayons. It's a great thing for early finishers to work on that's on topic and also goes in the art book! Double whammy!

1st Grade Clay-liens!

This year I got smart about clay and narrowed it down to "clay week", which naturally turned into clay month factoring in 2 days of hand-building then one day of glazing...and still have yet to hit 4th grade's clay project...eek. Anyways, the clay aliens...or clay-liens as I have so dubbed them always are a bit hit. The kids love clay, obviously, but they really get to be "free" when creating these creatures. Here you can see them after the glazing process...and honestly I'm a little disappointed with the glazes this year. They turned out super light...oh well. They're still awesome. 

This was our little clay-lien miracle/beautiful oops...a clay-lien somehow attached itself to a 2nd grader's coil pot and fused together in the kiln. Together they look like A.the clay-lien threw up into the coil pot or B. the clay-lien has a hilariously huge underbite. I couldn't let either kid take this so it will live with me.