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