Monday, November 1, 2010

Patterning with Nature

This week's class transitioned to our last section in Relationships. For this week and next week, I am focusing on our relationships with the natural environment. In order to transition from the previous week's lesson (The Five Senses) to our first lesson dealing with the environment, I decided to work with clay, so that we could address things like sense of touch while introducing students to the environment.

I began the lesson with a discussion on patterns. After talking with the students in previous classes, I found out that many of the students have already talked about patterns in school. I used this to create a discussion with the students during our first talk of the lesson. During the discussion, the students were able to articulate what they thought a pattern was, as well as point out patterns in the classroom and also patterns in nature they were able to see from the windows. I tried to make the "lecture" part of this lesson a little more fun by turning things into games for the students. When I asked them what patterns they could see from the windows, they quickly got up and ran over to look out of them and shouted out what patterns they saw. Afterwards, to get them back to the carpet and back to paying attention to what I was saying, I made another game, where I would show the students close up images of patterns found in nature and the students were encouraged to yell out what they thought the close up image was. I was surprised that although this lecture/discussion was the longest one we have had yet (about 20 minutes) the students were attentive the entire time (for the most part.) I ended the discussion by explaining to students what we were doing for our art project of the day.

Our Patterning with Nature project consisted of students carving and imprinting patterns into 5" x 5" clay earthenware tiles. To do this, we split the class up into three groups, and each instructor took a group for a short walk outside to collect items from the environment to use to create their patterns in the clay tiles. Students collected things like leaves, pine cones, pebbles, berries, twigs, and other like items. After returning from our walk we had another discussion, this time on clay. It was interesting to hear how students thought clay was created and how people made pottery thousands of years ago before modern technology. Most of the students were right on with their answers. I wanted to tie in elements from art history, so one of the main things we talked about and looked at in this discussion was Jomon Pottery. The students seemed very interested in the images that I presented them with and had much to talk about with them, whether it was about how people made them, how they survived thousands of years to reside in museums today, and the patterns that they saw within the vessels.

Before the students began working on creating their patterns on the tiles, I did a quick demo of how they could go about using some of the items they collected. During this demo I covered a few vocabulary words that were written on the board. I went over what a pattern was again and also included words like texture and layering. After the demo, students went to their seats and began on their tiles. I thought it was fun that after teaching the students what the vocabulary words meant, I heard them using them when explaining their work to me. As students were beginning to finish up work on their tiles, I did another demo of how to apply white slip to their tile and sponge off the outer layer, resulting in a strong contrast between the red clay and what would be the white lines of their carvings.
As usual, some students finished up early, and we had a clay station set up as another option from their usual go to, which is sketchbooks. I was surprised how many students chose to continue working and experimenting with clay over returning to work in their sketchbooks. I even heard a few of them ask their parents if they could take pottery classes because they loved working with clay so much. A few of the students made things they really enjoyed, so I told them if they put their initials on their pieces, we would fire them, too so they could take them home. Another fun thing about the popularity of the station was that I was able to have another informal lesson at the station where I taught the students how to make pinch pots. Rouwa, Nicole and Casey all made pinch pots, and although they found it to be difficult at first, they were able to persevere and make tiny little pinch pots that they loved.

Everything in class seemed to go fairly smoothly and the students seemed to have a lot of fun with the project. Even Evan, our troublemaker, got into the project and kept himself occupied instead of wandering off and causing disruptions.
One of the things I am struggling with though, is special treatment of students. As I was reviewing the video of my discussions, I noticed that I was giving Christina some kind of special attention. During the discussions, I noticed that although Christina has no problem talking about her work to her instructors, when she is placed in a discussion group she becomes really shy and kind of fall to the back of the group. I tried to provide her some scaffolding so she could answer some of the questions I addressed the class with, but I'm not sure if that is a good thing. The students already notice the special attention that Christina gets regarding her sketchbook, even often time asking myself, Allison, or Betsy why Christina gets to do certain things when they cannot. I don't know if giving Christina this attention during discussion is helping that situation at all.

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