Clay Club

For the past five weeks I have taken an extra hour out of my day to hold clay club at my base school, the one with the 4 walls : ) Sometimes I have ideas for after school art clubs, which my Principal is very supportive of. Anywho, I was going to make a post each week but with the site down until now, I will just lump it all together. Yay long story short!

Ok, so I started off by making the clay club available to the 5th and 6th graders at my school. I put out a box they could drop their name into and a few weeks later I would randomly select 10 students to participate. I had over 30 names in the box after I sifted through (some put their name in 2 or 3 or 5 times so I had to get those out of there before I drew names). The Librarian at my school was going to help me with the club so I chose 5 and she chose 5. Clay club was set, and the girl who put her name in 5 times was drawn too!

The first week we made frogs with open mouths on lilypads. I taught them how to connect peices and smooth lines to hide seams. This turned out to be the fave of the 4 projects. The next week we made coil pots with different, more difficult coil desings than they would have learned in our regular art class. Then we made pinch pot cups/mugs the next week. I felt they didn't really like this project the best but learned how to make handles nonetheless. Our last project was a clay whistle. This was the most fun for me and the most difficult for them. I think we got everyone's to actually whistle too!

The time all went very fast. I would make this clay club last 80 minutes instead of an hour. I was rushing them to finish and they wanted to take more time and make these elaborate quality peices. I felt at the time I scheduled the club they would most likely finish what they needed to in the hour, but live and learn I guess. I wouldn't have had the club meet more than 5 times because I don't want to wrap the clay up. I'm not there every day and that's a lot of storage room. So, it worked pretty well to just finish a project in one class.

I was a little sad this last week because it seemed that some of the kids made some new friends they normally wouldn't talk to in school. The girl who put her name in 5 times and who loves the club, forgot to come last week and instead went home on the bus. She missed ice cream sundaes with sprinkles and the works. I saw her the next day and we laughed about how she completely forgot. I promised I'd get her a cookie to make up for the missed ice cream : )