Hi friends. I have so many projects back-logged to show you. I did clay with all of my classes during the month of September. We are building on to our school and because of construction, our kiln will be out of commission at the end of November through the end of the school year, so we have to get all of our clay done now!
My 5th/6th grade classes made clay castles. They will be studying the Medieval period later in the year, so I connected this unit to Medieval castles. Many of them made traditional-looking castles and others decided to make more unique interpretations.
One student made all these different towers.
We built these using slab construction techniques. If you are unfamiliar with how to build using slab construction, I would recommend watching a how-to DVD or looking it up on Youtube. Here is a step-by-step photo tutorial.
Some of the students worked in pairs to make their castles and others worked alone.
We use mostly the Amaco Teacher’s Palette glazes to color them.
I love how unique this one is. Three girls worked to make a tree house castle.
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This is truly wonderful. Mixing art and history. They all did a great job.
Nicole/Beadwright
Thanks, Nicole!
I have made castles this year with grade 5. I haven’t put them on my blog yet as overall I was quite disappointed with what the bulk of the children came up with. We looked at lots of images of castles from different parts of the world and discussed their use as defense and how compared to today’s family dwellings they weren’t really that comfortable to live in, etc.Their enthusiasm for the discussion made me think they would really come up with some great ideas but in the end, but not really. Their skill levels were so low I couldn’t believe it – I hadn’t taught these students for a few years.They struggled to cut the slab walls out once they had rolled the clay, let alone try to join them together! However they did ooh and aah over the few that were amazing – and they were!
I challenged them to add something to their castle rather than it just being the structure and some chose to have vines winding around their tower a la Rapunzel, some added open drawbridges which actually stayed together through the trip into the kiln and a few added a dragon! It never ceases to amaze me that after all these years of teaching art things can still surprise me!!!