I found this great video on www.teachertube.com
http://www.teachertube.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=54540&title=Self_Portrait_Stories
It goes with the first week of school self portrait lesson. My students loved it, and it was a great way to start off the class and get them excited about drawing themselves!
I found this lesson at http://www.inthirdspace.net/
I am so excited to make these with my third graders!!
1. Give each student a piece of clay about the size of a small apple. Instruct them to remove a small piece for the stem and set aside. The rest of the clay is to be split into 2 sections.
2. After warming and softening the clay with their hands, each of the 2 sections needs to be turned into a ball and then into a smooth pinch pot. The goal is to have 2 bowls that roughly match each other in size.
3. Discuss how any time clay pieces are to be blended together, they need to be scored (scratched) and “puttied” together with slip (clay mud). Roughen up the edges of each bowl with a fork, wet with slip, and gently push the two bowls together. Use clay tool to blend together and hide seam.
4. A small stem is to be formed from the last piece of clay. It also gets scored and slipped on what is determined to be the top of the ball. Encourage extra blending on stem base as they are prone to fall off otherwise.
5. The students then hold the pumpkin in their hands and use a round tube, such as a jumbo-size pencil to push in ridges. If they rock the pencil from the stem to the bottom, rotate, and press again, they will form what look like the ridges of the pumpkin. Names may then be scored onto the bottom.
6. The next day, I had students draw lightly on the clay what they wanted their faces to look like. I kept it simple with only allowing circles, triangles or squares (no teeth!). It takes a sharp knife to cut out the faces, so I did it for them with an xacto knife.
7. When the clay is no longer cool to the touch, do a bisque firing with all the pumpkins. Have the students paint the pumpkins with glaze, and fire again.
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Yesterday one of my friend and fellow art teachers from http://www.missartclass.blogspot.com/ (under construction) came over and showed me some cool clay samples for IDEAS since I am trying to focus on lay this year!
Below is a “nature pocket” with a sun, a flower and a butterfly. There is a pocket under the green part to hang and put flowers in it!!
These are giant clay belt buckles painted with gold and silver tempra. They even have the buckle attachment on the back! They were cut from a slab.
This is a tile painted with watercolor made to look like a view from a broken window. They clay sucks up the watercolor so fast it doesn’t have time to drip in the cracks.
These fish were textured using those plastic texture plates usually used for crayon rubbings!! The leather cord adds a nice organic looking touch!!
I use my texture plates for lots of different things. They are great to have in the art room!
Christmas cookie ornament. This is a great project for kinder. Shannon places all kinds of objects on the table (shells macaroni, sticks, legos,little toys, rocks, beads, marker tops) She precuts the clay slab with a biscuit cutter and puts the children’s name already on the back. She uses a translucent white glaze called pearl as the icing (she said this example had way too much glaze and that usually you can see the imprints much better)
I also love this idea of making pinch pot fish and pinch pot monsters. Just make a pinch pot, turn it on its side and add eyes, fins, antenae, scales, texture, tails, claws arms, wings, ect.!!
This summer I learne some awesome new things at my Mayco glaze inservice. One thing that BLEW MY MIND was that you can paint glaze on WET or bone dry CLAY!!! YEEEES you DO NOT have to fire it before glazing!
The pot below was made with the COOLEST glaze by Mayco called cobblestone. First paint your sculpture with black foundation glaze, the two coats of mayco cobblestone, then one thin coat of ANY OLOR. The cobblestone makes the color break into little raised cobblestone like shapes and then the black shows through the cracks! Its AMAZING!
Below are the SUPER POPULAR “Jungle Gems” crystal glazes by Mayco. The glazes have little chunks in them that explode and melt into little color specs after fired! They look so cool and if you want the background color to be different. You can paint a coat of a darker color on top and the color gems will show through. We used the orangy one below but put black foundations on top to that the little red, yellow and green flecks will show on a black background.
I found this project on the Mayco website. I think it would be cute with pinch pots! Then they could add the bird. It would even be cool to put blue marbles inside to melt the glass and look like water!!! It is good to crush the marbles in a sock with a hammer first.
I hope you liked these clay ideas as much as I did! Let me know if you use any of them and post pics of your results! You can order Mayco glazes and see lots of other cool clay projects http://maycocolors.com/index.html
Hello blogging world art teacher friends!!! For some of you, the summer is coming to the close and the fresh smell of empty rooms and blank planners is near!!! I am in need of some great beginning of school activities. I have posted below my all time favorite first week of school activity for you!!! It was easy to set up, mess free, and made a BEAUTIFUL display (great way to start out the year) I would LOVE now, for you to post YOUR beginning of the year activities for inspiration!!! I love reading all of your blogs and use so many of your fabulous ideas!!! If you want the lesson plan for the activity below, just e-mail me and I’ll send it over! Natty241@hotmail.com
If your blog is not on my blog roll PLEASE comment or e-mail it to me so I can add you!! Ok, the lesson below is the one i was talking about. It didn’t publish earlier so here it is. I posted this last year but here it is again!
This was my first day of school project this year. It was a great way to learn their names and talk about how special and different everyone is! I did this with grades kinder through fifth and they ALL loved it! Since the students are learning the color wheel I thought it would introduce color relationships in a fun way. Each table had a different color . One color. Red table had red, blue tables had blue, yellow had yellow, and so on. Since they had markers, pencils, and crayons, it allowed for various shades and hues of the same color. The 4th and fifth graders could use 2 colors; one color and one analogus color to make the intermediate color transitions in the mural from one color to the next. For the border I put butcher paper on each table and let kinder and first draw and paint different kinds of lines with their lines and color lesson, then cut it into strips to use for border. I glued all the index cardstogether on a looooooong piece of butcher paper in color order to create the mural.
We talked first about drawing your face. Oval head, then ears in the middle, then hairline from one ear to the next, line for the part of the hair if its a girl, eyes where the ears are in the middle, then nose half way b/w eyes and chin, and lips half way b/w nose and chin. We looked at many different hairstyles and how to draw them from the hair line. 
