2nd week january 6-8th

This trimester I have mostly 7th graders who are notoriously cranky and unmotivated, my least favorite grade to work with. This group is no exception, the few 6th and 8th graders are getting their projects done and are on task and the 7th graders are slow and whinny and cranky.

We started out Greek art unit by looking at a PowerPoint of how the Greeks made progress in the drawing and sculpting of people. We spent the week practicing drawing figures in proportion, using contour lines to create 3-D form, then we posed the maniques, drew them, used the concepts of positive and negative space to turn them into black silouetts, (looked very quickly at the use of sillouet on Greek pottery) cut out our sillouets and created a colorful background for them....well at least half of the students did this like they were supposed to. They get to move onto our pottery project on Monday.

Monday we will all look at some Greek pottery and look at how they used colored slip and incising to add designs. Then those who are done with their silloute project will get to make a functional clay object. It can be a bowl, a plate or a vessel (one of our words for the week) aka vase. It needs to be made using coil post construction, need to show good slip and score, and then smoothing of coils using fingers and slip. We will be using a Terra cot red. Then when our projects are leatherhard we will paint them with black under glaze, let it dry a bit and then incise our designs onto them. We can use a combination of painting a design on and incising/scraffito (another word for the week) but each student must how some incising.

When that is done we will look and label the parts of the Parthenon and basic Greek architecture (pediment, frieze, capstone, columns...etc) last each student will be assigned a type of columns to draw and then put into scratch foam make three prints and trade with two other people till they have a collection of all three columns. After that it is time for Greek mosaics and then to do a brief Celtic textile project.