Tic Tac Toe, Ryan 5th grade

The second session of my kid’s after school clay class began 3 weeks ago and I aspire not to repeat lessons that I’ve taught for the past year, unless requested, because I have a dedicated core group of returning students.  I’m a fairly democratic teacher and give the kids a vote, though I am allowed veto power if I feel strongly about a project – and I have one of those coming up on the horizon – kids were rolling their eyes at me.  The kids had never crafted any games, so I put this on the docket for the first class of the session since the project is a little labor intensive.

I made some paper templates for classic games such as tic, tac, toe and chess & checkers, along with printing out the rules for each and also found a gazillion games on About.com, including many that use a 8×8 board like chess and checkers.  I also allowed the students to make up their own games and that is what most of them decided to do.

Rolling ball labyrinth game, Jasmine 5th grade

My daughter made a variation on the classic wooden labyrinth puzzle that I used to play as a child.  One of my great aunts kept this puzzle in her basement rec room and I would steal down the stairs while visiting and play this for hours.

Chess and Checkers board game, Natalie 4th grade

While I really encouraged the kids to make an 8×8 game because there’s so many games based on this template, only Natalie did.  She made her pieces to be used either as checkers or as chess pieces.  For checkers, she needed to make 24 playing pieces (12 each person different colors) and for chess, each player needs 16 playing pieces per player.  Her solution was to make 32 flat pieces like checkers and then she stamped different designs into the pieces which signify whether the piece is a rook, knight, bishop, queen, king, and glazed 1/2 in lavender – 1/2 in pink.  Pretty clever!

Made up game, Cole 3rd grade

Cole made up his own game with little animal playing pieces and one giant die.  I’m not sure if he has actually drafted the rules yet or not, but his game sure is cute!  Cole is my little owl obsessed sculptor – nearly every class, owl iconography makes its way into his work.

My daughter graduates from 5th grade this school year and I have warned my students that this might be the last year that I teach the clay class which is part of the after school enrichment program.  After class on Tuesday, one of the parents asked me if it truly was my last year teaching clay after school – not very fair to get their kids addicted to clay, is it?  Teaching the kid’s class is truly a labor of love – there’s a lot of work involved before, during and after class, and I don’t charge much since it’s one of the ways that I can give back to the school by making it affordable and accessible.  The PTA also provides scholarships for kids who want to take enrichment classes and that might not be able to afford it otherwise.

Most public schools have some sort of enrichment program including, sports, arts and crafts, technology, foreign languages, drama, science and more.  It wasn’t hard to get my class up and running once I proposed the class to the PTA and School Principal.  I did have to go through security screening since I’d be working with children, but since I was already licensed to substitute teach through the state of Colorado, all that info was already on file with the district.  If I didn’t have the license on file, it would have been easy to fill out the background check application, get fingerprinted and return to the school district.

There’s a demand for these kinds of kid’s activities and I could fill up my class 5 days a week if I had the energy.  It’s something to think about for those of you who are interested in teaching, yet haven’t been hired by an art or rec center, many of which are often fully staffed.

Meanwhile, I just received an email from the programming director at the Art Student’s League of Denver yesterday.  He put the call out for summer art camp proposals for next year – ack, I’m not sure I can project that far in advance.  Last summer, I taught 4 clay camps — 3 at the Art Students League of Denver and 1 at Anderson Ranch Arts Center and I’m not sure I want to do more than one or 2 camps next summer.  Teaching takes a lot out of me.

I’m almost current with my to-do list; though between yesterday and today, I’ve put in way more than my goal of no more than 2 hours of daily computer time.  Sometimes, necessity calls and I just have to oblige her – it doesn’t hurt that we’re having a bit of freezing rain today and it’s colder than heck out in my garagio.  I did manage to squeeze in a few studio hours, but it was more busy work cleaning up my kids stuff, loading their work in the kiln – but that frees up time for my own work this afternoon and tomorrow.

Toodles,

~Cynthia

Mouse ocarina made in my clay camp by Kaito

Horse ocarina made in my clay camp by

Click here to listen to what my basic ocarina sounds like

In addition to tending to my website and blog the past week, I’ve been teaching a kid’s clay camp at the Art Student’s League of Denver called, “Making Music with Clay” for 1st and 2nd graders from 9am to 12pm daily.  I originally proposed the class for an older age group, but was asked if I’d be willing to give it a go with a younger aged group by the programming director for the league.  I was a little nervous about it because I’ve never taught a clay class to anyone younger than second grade, but agreed to try it.  If all else failed, I knew we could always make a lot of little pots and sculptures.  My lesson plan this week included making rattles, whistles and drums with the freedom to modify as I saw fit.

We made rattles the first day and they were a hit.  I think kids love anything that makes sound and got such a kick out of the fact that they made this from a lump of clay.  We attempted whistles the 2nd day – which after plenty of research turned out fantastically well.  No one was more surprised and delighted than myself to hear all these great whistle sounds coming from all around the room.

Luckily, I had an assistant helping me who is going to be a sophomore at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who was really into making whistles despite the fact that his concentration is painting.  I wonder if I may have converted someone to clay because he told me he was interested in taking a clay class now after helping me.  Uh oh – watch out, it’s addicting!

My initial goal was to just make a simple whistle sound with no additional holes, however, my helper decided to add some to the whistle he made following the instructions that I had printed out in preparation for the class.  He was like the pied piper and had all the kids following him.

The key to getting it to whistle is proper placement of the hole in the body which needs to align with the flare of the form directly next to the extended mouth piece

I ended up ditching the drum project and we made some wind chimes instead the third day of class, then after asking the class what they wanted to make the 4th day, everyone agreed that they wanted to make ocarinas, which is a flute like wind instrument often made from clay.

Normally an ocarina is oval shaped and has anywhere from 4 to 12 finger openings and an extended mouth piece.  Ours only have 3 finger openings, but now I’d love to play around and make some with proper hole placement.  I punched the holes in the bodies sort of willy nilly – but you’ll have to forgive my faux pas because this is the first time I’ve ever made any whistles with finger holes.

Previously I’ve made whistles with kids and have had limited success creating a whistle sound.  This time, I sort of flipped back and forth to the different instructions offered by 3 different people and I made every single one of them whistle.  Here’s the down side of working with kids this young – while they constructed the bodies and mouth pieces themselves, I had to do the work to make their pieces whistle.  The upside is that after working on 15 of them, I know how to do it now with minimal effort or adjustment.

Here are the sites that I used that I thought had the best information about ocarinas and how to make them:

1. Ocarina Room by Kenji Ogawa from Japan
2. How to Make a Clay Whistle by Dwight U. Bartholomew
3. Make a Clay Whistle by Chris Henley

The ones I made with my class are sort of a hybrid of the 3 different artist’s linked to above.  It was sort of fun the day we made these – we had all sorts of kids wandering into my class to find the source of the whistle sounds.  I even had some older kids tell me that their class was boring and they wanted to be in mine.  Of course I enjoyed this immensely since this is the first time I’ve taught week long art camps at the ASLD and Anderson Ranch and had been feeling a little insecure.

Well, that’s it for now and yes, that’s my voice if you clicked on the Listen link at the top of this post.  I found this really cool free download to record music and sound from a microphone. You’ll have to excuse my ums and ahs (I tried practicing, but they came out anyway) and the whining of one of my dogs in the background – she really doesn’t like any kind of whistle apparently.

Have a great weekend,

~Cynthia

BTW, it helps to have a strong tolerance for noise and chaos when working with small children especially when they get excited!

Colorado Sunset

Hello All!  Just a quick post to let you know I’m back online.  I made some silly mistakes this weekend when I decided to tweak my blog.  Let’s just say that the tweak became a complete overhaul when I broke my website and had to repair and reload everything.  Luckily, I had a back up of my blog, along with posts and comments.  Many of the images are broken and the posts wonky, so I will be fixing those in the near future.  Also, I’m not sold on the header – but I had to have something up there.

While I was in the throws of near blog catastrophe despair, I learned a lot and then decided to go ahead and combine my website and blog using Wordpress to power the whole kit and kaboodle.  I also upgraded to the newest version of wordpress – 2.6 and then upgraded my K2 theme.  Unfortunately, K2 wasn’t working properly, and I had to find a new template.  I decided to use Tarski – it’s similar visually, yet different in admin mode.  I’m still trying to decide if I like it or not.

I found a slew of really cool plugins that I’ve uploaded to my blog but am still exploring including a gallery feature, SEO plugin and more.  Also, I’m still working on many of my pages, but, was starting to have blog withdrawals and just said screw it and decided to go live anyway.  I’m going to be making some custom pages (a whole other learning curve) for my static ones – basically everything but my blog.

Today, I started teaching the last clay camp of the summer at the Art Students League of Denver before school starts here next week.  In between teaching and preparing for class, I’ve been spending almost every waking moment getting my site back online.  Unfortunately, I’ve done a lot of double work, but in the end, I learned how to do a lot!

If you’ve sent me an email in the past 3-4 days, and I haven’t responded, it’s because I inadvertently deleted the database for my email account.  It’s back up, but I lost many addresses and emails.

I hope to catch up with my favorite blogs tomorrow,

~Cynthia

A few of my students with their marionettes

My first week long art camp at the Art Student’s League of Denver ended on Friday and whew – we finished each and everyone of the marionettes!  Time was tight, however, and I was sweating bullets to have them completely assembled by the end of class at 4:00pm.

Since it was the first time I taught this class, I learned a ton.  For one thing, this might be a little ambitious for the younger kids in the class – though not all.  I also realized that I need to do quite a bit of the prep work ahead of class to save time.  It’s amazing how fast 3 hours passes!  For the most part, the marionettes were a success.  I was starting to feel a little worried that it was too tough for the kids or that they weren’t  having any fun, but after asking them point blank, all the kids said they were having a blast.  I suppose I shouldn’t be so self conscious in the future.

Claire, age 10 with her horse woman marionette

All of the kids were quite creative with their designs which created a bit of a challenge for me and my assistant.  I created my prototype and all of the templates based on a standing figure – so when a few of the kids designed a different type of character, such as the horse/woman, we had to put our thinking caps on to make them work.

Haley, age 10 with “Camp Dork”

Some kids really ran with their ideas!  I wondered if “Camp Dork” was a sort of self portrait since Haley was enrolled in many different camps this summer since both her parents work full time.

Despite only being 8 and entering 3rd grade this fall, Marielle created a terrific marionette named “Rosy”

Rosy is an art cat with paintbrush in hand, beret cocked to the side on his head and magnificent yellow wings.  Marielle was one of the kids in class who was quite a perfectionist and had a very specific idea of what she wanted her marionette to look like.  In fact, after not finding the right fabric for her cat in class, she brought some orange felt from home to finish him.  I was so excited to see her finished piece and also amazed at her craftsmanship.

Ben, age 10 also made a non-figurative marionette of bacteria

There were probably 5 kids in the entire class of 17 that chose something entirely different and creative.  It’s one of the main reasons that I enjoy teaching kids because they think outside of the box a good bit of the time.  Their creativity hasn’t been drilled out of them yet.

Emma, age 9 created her opera singing marionette

Emma did a fantastic job with her character, especially with accessories and sculpting the clay pieces.  If you click on the photo to enlarge it, you will see quite a unique head along with some amazing shoes and feet.

Anna, age 9, created a foot marionette

I’m not sure if you can see the head – it’s actually 5 toes with a crocheted hat.  Another creative challenge for me to help her see her design to completion.

Ellie, age 8

Despite being one of the younger kids in class, Ellie did not need much help making her piece.  She was enthusiastic and had some definite ideas of how she wanted hers to look.

Maud, age 9 one of the Yugioh characters

I’m so out of the loop – when Maud was making her marionette, I had a hard time remembering that it was a Yu-gi-oh.  In fact, Yugiohs must be the hot new kid thing.  More than one kid was talking about them and I even had to reprimand one of my students who brought his Yugioh trading card collection to class every day.  I would catch him talking about his cards and looking through them instead of making his marionette.  Come to think of it, he didn’t finish his marionette by the end of class because we didn’t get the control bars attached to his piece.  But, he didn’t seem to care – his mind was elsewhere.

Liz, 8 years, self portrait

Liz did a terrific job with her marionette.  Since I had 17 kids in the class, it was a big surprise to see everyone’s pieces assembled since I couldn’t spend a ton of time individually with each child.  I realized by day 4 that I would need to attach the control bars and strings to the kid’s marionettes for them on the last day so that moment was really the big reveal of their work to me.

Overall, it was a good experience, though I was thoroughly exhausted by the end of class on Friday.  If I plan on teaching this class again, I’ll need to tweak my lesson to make it just a little easier for the younger kids or offer it to older children with longer attention spans and manual dexterity.

Meanwhile, I start teaching a printing on clay art camp tomorrow.  I’m definitely more relaxed this week and am looking forward to switching gears a little bit.  I’ve made my clay slip for the slip transfers we’re doing tomorrow and need to pack my gear so that I’m ready to go early morning.

Have a good week,

~Cynthia