Art
News Update
By
Lisa Kanode, K-12 Art Instructor at Exeter-Milligan
We’ve
learned to recycle clay in the art room so with all the extra clay laying
around we have taken advantage of making a lot of hand built and wheel thrown
pottery. Fifth graders are doing a simple study of ancient Greek Amphora’s and
how they were used and then they take their hand at building coil bowls of
their own. Second graders make fish sculptures out of clay and work on creating
textures in their clay that look a little fishy. First graders make pinch pots
and experiment with the different colors of glaze. We haven’t yet gotten to the
3rd grade castles and 4th grade platters, but the high school art students have
built slab pottery and a few even worked on the pottery wheel, some of them
with great success! Some of the high school students are learning about loading
and unloading the kiln and how often you have to check and adjust the
temperature of the kiln. In our fast paced world with so much instant
gratification, this is one art activity that teaches and encourages patience as
after building your piece, you then wait 1-2 weeks for it to slowly and surely
dry completely before doing a bisque firing, then you get to see if your piece
survived the kiln. After that you can add the glaze and then wait for enough
pieces to be ready to load the kiln and have it fired again. The pieces will be
on display in the school libraries and at the schools music concerts. Please be
careful when handling your pottery as some of us have already learned that they
are more fragile than we think, and while most broken things are fixable, they
will never be quite the same again! A quote by Maya Angelou reminds us to keep
practicing our creativity, which I encourage you all to do! “You can’t use up
creativity, the more you use, the more you have.” In other words if we don’t
use our creativity the opposite is sure to happen and we will lose it! My
student’s come into the art room and it’s like a weight is lifted off their
shoulders, it is one place they can think their own thoughts and do their own
work, no one paper should be the same, therefore no really right or wrong
answer is discovered, just lots of thinking and discovering going on.
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