clay

What is with kids and clay? It is as though all rules are thrown out the window and the classroom turns into chaos. I don't get it. The first project was a pinch pot they made into a bell. Today one student asked me what happened to his bell. I asked what it looked like. He told me a mushroom. I told him that it broke. It did break. He didn't assemble it very well. However, I noticed it looked more like a "shroom" than a "mushroom" so I threw it away. I warned my students over and over again, that they will only make projects suitable for the classroom and that sometimes accidents happen and I would HATE for their project to break/explode in the kiln/go missing. So I pointed out that his "mushroom" looked like a "shroom" and his response was "how did you know?" So the kid basically admitted to making a shroom and then wondered why it was no longer there. HA!

Today we worked on slab boxes. This means that you have to make slabs out of clay and then assemble the slabs into a box. Not difficult. To a student, it seems like the most difficult thing. This is especially true if you tell the students they cannot do something that already exists, like SpongeBob SquarePants or McDonald's french fries. So what did I get? French fries. Oreos. Tons of cup cakes. Mushrooms. Now, I had shown them an example of a mushroom, and I got more mushrooms. I would tell the student to not do a mushroom and I would get a response like "but it is not like that one, it is going to be like a Mario Brothers mushroom." So this mushroom is from a video game? Yep. Awesome.

Now if I wasn't presented a mushroom or cup cake, I got a lot of responses such as "I don't know what to do. What should I do?" It is not my project, I don't have to come up with the idea for you. "Ms. Stuart, you are not very creative." Again, not my project. WOW.