It's taken us a while, but our first three projects in my ceramics electives have finally been finished up. We started off the year with pinch pot tea cups, moved to coil tea pots (to make a set), and then we did slab masks. This covered the three basic hand-building skills and of course, wedging and scoring and slipping.
I am doing my best to make my assignments as open ended as possible. I mentioned in my previous post that I am moving towards TAB in my elementary room, and I'm also experimenting with it a bit in the high school room. Now, the electives are a bit harder to leave open ended in terms of choice of material, so I am doing my best to make the assignments as open ended as possible. In the beginning, it was sort of hard to think up assignments that are open-ended, but it's getting easier and easier as we go.
To make our slab masks, I gave students a variety of mask forms to choose from to slump their slabs over. They were required to give their mask a theme, and to think about texture. The lion mask above? That right there is the first 100 I've ever given on an assignment! The pictures literally give it no justice. I'm loving that my students are thinking outside the box, too, with their surface decoration. Our district's mascot is a cougar, so one of my volleyball players made a cougar mask and meticulously glued in fishing twine to the whisker holes she made. It literally took her 2 1/2 class periods to hot glue those babies into the holes. So awesome!
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The tea cups and tea pots were two separate assignments but they had to go together. Students were required to make four identical shaped tea cups (though surface decoration could vary a bit based on the theme).
I've got more to come after this! Our current two projects that are being finished up are ceramic shoes (life size!) and chia pets. :)