6th Grade Greek Pottery (Traditional and Modern)

While I was doing my long term substitute teaching at Amherst Middle School last spring, I wanted to tie a couple of art lessons to what the students were learning in their other courses. I had missed the Egyptian unit in Social Studies (they covered that before my time), but I was there for their study of ancient Greece. I thought they might like to learn about ancient pottery.

Look at this pot design-how cool is this?!

 I gave them a presentation on Greek pottery (a PowerPoint presentation that introduced styles such as Geometric, Red Figure, Black Figure and White Ground) and I found it helpful to give the students a double-sided graphic organizer that would help them take notes on the presentation. After my presentation, I left the following link open for the students to play around with: Greek Pot Painter from the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. It's an interactive website the students can use to learn more about Greek Pottery.

This double-sided graphic organizer followed my talk
exactly and was easy for the students to fill out
as I went through the slide show.

Students then created two pot designs: one traditional Greek pottery design using traditional pot shapes and imagery and another pot design using a modern pot shape and imagery. The students had lots of fun designing both!

I then showed them how to use oil pastels and watered down tempera paint to make their own scratch boards. When the scratch boards were dry, students could choose to scratch one of their designs into the scratchboard (this is loosely based on sgraffito where potters scratch designs into colored slip). The great thing about doing this project is that the 6th graders took a trip to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts during this time and saw actual Greek pottery on display--they thought that was so cool!

These came out so neat--definitely a keeper!

Here's our Greek Cupboard full of wonderful Greek pottery!

The pot on the right was inspired by Minoan Pottery
(I showed the students the famous Octopus pottery from that region) 

I like how this pot has multiple layers of imagery.

These pots have some unique shapes and designs inspired by nature.

The middle pot shows an alien abduction! So clever!

Some students worked very hard to create detailed imagery
depicting soldiers or mythological beings and then painstakingly
scratched their designs onto the boards. So great!

Big Mouth Critters

OK, so I've seen those clay critters on the internet where students make pinch pots and use those for the mouths of a critter frog, fish, beaver, monster, etc. They are CUTE and I knew I had to make them with my home school kids. They've been working so hard these past few weeks I wanted to treat them to some clay time!

What a cute doggie!

I showed the children examples of caricatures. We discussed why an artist would use that technique and compared real photos of people to caricature drawings of them. What a great conversation we had!

I don't have a kiln, so we used air dry clay for this project. The children seemed to have a great time making these! And I could see doing a variation of this for medieval gargoyles or for a fun nature project.

Here are some of my notes from this project:

• I started by giving each child enough clay for a pinch pot only and walked them through the technique of making a pinch pot.
• Then I gave each child another ball of clay (about the same size as the first) for their critters' features and limbs. This helped to ensure that the critters did indeed have a large mouth and the students were able to create the pinch pot--an integral part of the project.
• Air dry clay works OK. I used Crayola brand with my students, but one bucket of clay was more moist than the other. I just had the kids knead the dry dough and work in a little water to make it more pliable. I used 2 five pound buckets of Crayola air dry clay for 12 critters.
• I used a bit of the clay in some water to make slip (a slurry of clay and water used to attach clay pieces together). I demonstrated to the children how to "scratch and attach" the clay pieces such as eyeballs and legs to the pinch pot form. I gave each student a cotton swab and a toothpick for this.  Using this technique allows the pieces of air dry clay to fuse together better than just squeezing them together.
• I brought in a hot glue gun the next week to attach any pieces that may have come off during drying. Most were pretty good.
• We used acrylic craft paint to finish our critters. The colors are nice. Next time I might try finishing them with a varnish or clear coat to make them shiny.

We loved this project! Try it yourself (and send me pictures!!)!

Enjoy!

A bunny.

A turtle.

A "blood thirsty" beaver
(I'm not making this up!).

A frog and its dinner (a fly).