7th Grade Pottery Class

Welcome to 7th Grade Pottery. Students are guided to dramatize and stylize representational forms and colors to represent a given period or culture, with emphases on motif and function.

Students use the drape mold method to make plates for the Medieval Banquet. They use learned techniques and methods of slip trailing, sgraffito, refinishing, as well as critical thinking, correlating themes and symbols to design and decorate plates that reflect the medieval period. Quality and not quantity is stressed.

Students are introduced to figure sculpture to reinforce their understanding of proportion, texture, mass and point of view. They can come to understand weight distribution and learn to connect forms or reinforce them with extra clay for sturdiness. Children can see that the use of one or two details may give a sculpture greater impact than would many details. Students participate in body awareness exercises to enable them to experience the many challenges and potential problems of figure sculpting before working in clay. Figures are made from coils or can be modeled. As the students finish a figure sculpture, they can add to it by putting another figure in some relationship to the first one. They can add other forms and details, or place figures in a setting with landscape materials such as shells, rocks, grasses or furniture.