John Gehman of Architectural Woodworking Associates has built and donated a custom wedging table to help kick start our ceramics program.
John made sure to design a table that was perfect for our art classroom. A store-bought wedging table of the same size would cost about $500-$800. John's donation is greatly appreciated as it will help us put together a wonderful ceramics program.
You read more about it here.
How can you express a mood through color?
Seventh graders explored this question while learning about basic facial proportions. We looked at the work of Egon Schiele and German Expressionist painters such as Max Beckmann and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.
Students were encouraged to play with color and take risks. As usual, they blew me away with their results. Here are just a few.
Sixth grade students have been studying Ancient Mesopotamia in Mr. Moran's Social Studies class. In Art & Enrichment, we have been exploring the question, "How do humans communicate through writing?". We began by looking at cuneiform writing. With the help of the University of Pennsylvania Museum website, students roughly translated their names into cuneiform. They then wrote as a Babylonian scribe would have written; into a clay tablet with a reed-like stylus.
We later went on to create individualized pictographs. Just as an abstracted barley plant became a basis for cuneiform, students abstracted drawings of their ideas they wanted to communicate. These abstracted symbols became a coded pictograph that fellow students could try to decipher.
Here they are...the 2010 Scarecrows created by 6th, 7th, and 8th graders. Scarecrows were inspired by characters from books read in Beth McCann's Language Arts class. We took over the auditorium and used any materials we could find to bring these characters to life.
(What a crowd! The red one up front is especially strange.)
The scarecrows are sponsored by the Frenchtown Business and Professional Association, who awarded prizes to 1st, 2nd, and 3rd winners. Prizes were also given by the Frenchtown American Legion. Thank you to Cathy Smith for your cloth donations.
There were so many wonderful scarecrows this year! Here are just a few.
This dragon's scales are made of many pieces of cardboard, each cut and wrapped in aluminum foil.
Chairman Mao looks a tad angry!
The Spelling Bee from The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster.
A bullfighter...
...and his bull
