Grade 2 Clay Owl Pictures

As follow-up to one of my fall lessons here, I wanted to share just a few pictures that I took of students' clay owls. The project was a huge hit, and the kids were very keen to wrap their owls up in little organza bags and give them as holiday gifts.

The owls on display in the glass hallway cabinet. (I put in some pinecones and branches so they would feel at home.)

Clay Owls...in process

I have seventy Grade 2 students, so clay projects are a production (especially if I have to do two firings, one for bisque and one for glaze). This clay owl project from Teaching Art with Attitude that I found on Pinterest is great because they only need the one firing and they get finished with oil pastel and black paint/ink. Easy!

Students were each given a slab of low-fire terracotta clay, were shown an owl shape on the board, lightly drew their shape on the clay and cut it out using a wooden skewer. Then they smoothed the rough edges with some water.

Eyes were punched out with plastic lids, stamped in the middle with the top of a marker, and lines were drawn around the eyes. The beak was then drawn and cut out. Students then scored and slipped the eyes and beak and attached them to their owls. Wings were drawn, and texture was added with clay tools and the tops of markers.

Later in the day, I went around and poked one or two holes on each owl's head for hanging purposes. Then I placed wet paper towel over each one to minimize cracking in the drying process.

The owls have just been fired now and the kids are super excited to work on them in class next week.

I wanted to test out the finishing process, so here is my owl. I coloured on it with oil pastels and gave it a bath in watered-down India ink. Then I dried it off and attached some copper wire to hang it.

The original lesson said to bathe the owl in watered-down tempera but I decided to try India ink and loved the super black effect.

I heart Instagram.

Students' owls to be posted next week!

Castles in Clay

 
Here is a very successful clay project that my Grade 5s worked on last month!

My Grade 5 theme is Medieval and Renaissance art, and I thought it might be neat to look at castle architecture and build some castles out of clay. I got some inspiration from a picture of a clay castle that I saw on this K-8 Blog.

I only see each of my Grade 5s classes for about 12 weeks (1 term) and during that time, we try to explore as many different art materials as possible. With that in mind, I chose compress the project into fewer classes by opting to do the facade of a castle (rather than a 3-D model), and using air-dry clay. In this lesson, I also wanted to focus on as many ceramics skills as possible: slab-making, texture application, and the score and slip technique.

The first thing I had students do when they came into art the first day of the project was to have them draw "the castle of their dreams" in their sketchbooks. This really got everyone's creativity flowing. Then I showed them a short Prezi full of castle architecture images to get them even more inspired.

I showed students how to throw and roll out a slab of clay. They lightly drew the outline of their castle with a wooden stylus and used exacto blades to make nice clean cut outs of their castles.(I also had some pieces of canvas pre-cut for students to do their clay work on so that it wouldn't stick to the art tables.)
NB: Next time, I would have students make their slabs about twice as thick as we had some unfortunate breakages with castles that were too thin and fragile.

Then students started to divide up the castle and added texture to different areas. I have some great texture plates in my classroom, as well as scraps of textured material that worked wonderfully.

Finally, students added on the windows, doors, and other details with the score and slip technique, which I demonstrated.

 

 

Work in progress....



The castles were left to dry and then painted with acrylics and coated with gloss in the next class. Metallic paint worked very well on the air dry clay.

  

 

Finally, the castles were displayed together and propped up with these great little acrylic easels.

Here are the amazing results:

  

                                                                                 

The possibilities are endless for lesson extensions and cross-curricular connections! (ie. making figurines to go with the castle, writing a story or poem etc....)