March Art a la Carte

This past Wednesday was Eric's monthly art class, called Art a la Carte. I was post-call that day, so I had not seen him since Tuesday morning. I got him his "usual" Wendy's spicy chicken nuggets and vanilla Frosty and came for lunch. While at lunch, he noticed that a couple of the other parents that were having lunch with the kids had bought lunch from the school cafeteria. I'm not interested in eating school cafeteria food. I'm not even interested in eating Wendy's. Patrick and I had gone to Magnolia Pancake Haus for breakfast and I was still quite full.

I didn't take a picture of the whole First Grade billboard in the art room this time. Since today's project was a dimensional piece, the art teacher didn't put the example piece up on the board, but held it up during class instead. I should have taken a picture of it, but I thought I would take a picture of the words describing the lesson for that day instead. The tub shown has a bunch of clay balls stored inside sandwich bags. There was a bag like these at each child's place when they came into the room. Most of them wanted to touch it right away, so she warned them right away to listen to her first.

Ms. R told the kids all about making the use of texture in art, from two-dimensional paintings to three-dimensional sculptures. She told them step by step how to prepare their clay so there wouldn't be any pockets of air inside that might burst during the drying process. The kids basically had to throw their clay down on the tables. Some of the girls apparently had trouble with not wanting to touch the soft, wet clay. I had the same problem myself.

Eventually, the clay flattened out, then the kids used rulers to cut the clay into a rectangular piece. They then used various materials such as beads, pieces of spirals from spiral notebooks, and woven pieces to make impressions in the clay to create different textures. She had instructed the kids to make four rectangles like in Eric's piece, or make four or so longer rectangles arranged horizontally in a "stripe" pattern. Some kids chose several more "stripes". One kids not only made four rectangles, he also made lines in a cross-wise fashion, for many little shapes with different textures. I always love seeing how creative the kids get in this class.

The pieces now have to dry and Ms. R will paint them all white and put a ribbon through the holes we made at the top. I'll have to take a picture of the finished piece to share in a future blog post.