my hands are my heart

Our fourth grade artists watched an interview with Art21 artist Gabriel Orozco. We used his work My Hands Are My Heart as a starting point for an exploration of clay, process, and the connection of creating and caring. This fit in beautifully with our fourth grade theme, Artists Making a Difference!

Students were asked to only use their hands to create a heart (no tools allowed other than stamps for their name). Some hearts took the form of vessels, baseballs, mountains, or beloved pets. Some hearts wore their family names, some touched deeply with fingertips, and some hearts were perfectly smoothed. All of these hearts were a wonderful play in process and a great way for us to start our year of caring and creating.

birthday birds

Say hello to our new batch of birthday birds! The sixth graders do a service project at the beginning of each year. It is their job to sculpt and glaze 300+ little clay birds. Making this many multiples requires a different set of art skills than spending lots of hours on just one piece, so it's a valuable experience.





The birthday birds were inspired by this project and these little birds a few years ago. When a kiddo comes to art on his or her birthday/gotcha day (or as long as it's the same week), he or she gets to pick out a birthday bird. We do summer bdays in June so that everyone will get one by the end of the school year. The kids LOVE choosing a special bird to take home. Well done sixth graders- thanks for working so hard to brighten someone else's day!

Pandora's Box: Opening at a theater near you!

I shared this movie trailer with Anne's fourth grade class (greek mythology experts) and I thought you might like to see it too!

pandora's box from on Vimeo.

So I guess you know that I was just having some fun with imovie now. Anne's fourth grade class did love seeing their art on the "big screen" and it was a great way to start off a group discussion/reflection about the project.

fourth grade pandora's box

The story of Pandora's Box is a rich source for visual interpretation. The students were asked to create their own Pandora's Box from clay using a slab construction technique. This was a wonderful opportunity for independent study and each student developed their own ideas through sketches and discussion. The results are highly original and creative interpretations of an ancient myth.



















The fourth graders were asked to write artist statements. They could write about their creative process, write an original story or poem, or retell the myth referencing details from their boxes. For the first time this year, we used garageband to make a multimedia artist statement. They loved doing this part and did a great job using the art room macs! For example, here is a play on Pandora Radio from clever Willa:

Untitled from on Vimeo.

Allison did a beautiful job describing the artmaking process:

Untitled from on Vimeo.

And Fran gives us a dramatic retelling of the original myth:

Untitled from on Vimeo.

See all of the fourth grade Pandora's Boxes here!

second grade full moon rattles

May is the Flower Moon

Can you guess how the second grade artists made these ceramic rattles? They used a special technique using two pinch pots to make a round rattle inspired by the full moon. We read some full moon poems from the book, When The Moon Is Full by Mary Azarian. The titles of the poems are from Native American names for each full moon. The second grade artists chose a poem to inspire their own full moon rattle design.


June is the Strawberry Moon

Each rattle has a unique sound depending on the size and number of beads inside. Lisa's second grade class worked with our amazing perfoming arts specialist, Ben Griffiths, to record these unique sounds using garageband (how cool is that?!). Originally, we had just wanted to make a recording of the rattles but our very creative students thought it would be even better to include the poems too!
Listen to all of their beautiful work here.


February is the Snow Moon


October is the Hunter’s Moon


August is the Green Corn Moon


January is the Wolf Moon


July is the Buck Moon


December is the Long Night Moon


March is the Sap Moon


April is the Frog Moon

We finished this project a couple of months ago to coincide with this rare cosmic event. We'll have to wait until the year 2094 to see that happen again but you can always see the next full moon on March 19th!

first grade leaf sculptures

We had our first taste of Spring weather this weekend in Saint Louis after many snowy and icy days! This reminded me of a project we did in first grade soon after this printmaking project.



The first graders used real leaves and large rubber leaf stamps to press the leaf texture on the clay. They carefully cut them out and assembled them using the score and slip method onto a base. The sculptures were fired in the kiln and painted using metallic watercolors. I am so impressed with these young artists! Their work is a beautiful reminder that our cold winter trees will soon have leaves again.





I love the little armadillo!

second grade texture tiles

The second grade artists spent some lovely spring mornings outside exploring textures. They used their naturalist and spatial intelligences to find natural objects that would make an interesting texture to print in the wet clay. They made two tiles each, one with an imprinted texture from a natural object and one built up texture inspired by nature. The clay pieces were kiln fired and then a special glazing technique was used to make the textures really stand out.

These are beautiful tokens of texture that will always remind us of our school garden.