Observation: Chrome Books, Clay Slabs, and Tornadoes

The students were introduced to my existence today and started to interact with me and ask me questions. The previous week, the students were ten minutes late, so there wasn't enough time to get through the lesson while also introducing me to the 5th graders.

Today they were instructed to bring their school-provided chrome books into the classroom for the purpose of researching images to use for inspiration for their upcoming clay slab project. Today was a planning day and they all had to end class with at least one sketch for a design.

At the beginning of class, the teacher decided to quickly review clay terminology and some techniques with the students. The students all seemed very excited to be starting the year off with clay and several volunteered to give answers to what slipping and scoring was, what the function of a kiln was, and so on. This was done today so that the following week, the students would already be in the clay mindset and all the teacher would have to do would be a slab rolling demonstration.

The teacher rationalized the use of the Chrome Books to the students by saying that she wants her students to look up images instead of everyone asking her how to draw a certain animal, object, etc. However, this method is not without fault. There is always a possibility that students will do more than just take inspiration from an image and down right plagiarize. Before the students were allowed to use their Chrome Books, she had to give the students "the talk" in regards to what is plagiarism and what isn't. There was also the danger of students being so focused on the images, that they forgot to make their sketches. This only happened to one boy, but he was able to make a quick sketch towards the end so he would at least have something.

She also showed some slide examples of other clay slabs. While she had a wide variety of examples, I noticed that all of the examples were representational of certain animals or things. I think it would have been worth wild to have included some geometric designs in the mix as well.

There was a young man at the front of the room who asked me if he could do a design solely based on lines, which I thought was actually pretty cool, but he wasn't sure if the teacher would allow it, even though I think she would have. I told him that I was pretty sure it was allowed, but to double check with the teacher just to be safe, however, she was wrapped up with another student's issue, described below, and wasn't aware of the other student's question. He ended up not going for the line design and chose to draw a sun instead. I believe this situation could have been avoided if there was a wider range of examples used in the beginning of the lesson.

The idea of plagiarism came up in class when a young man wanted to do the Superman symbol. The Superman symbol is iconic and there isn't a lot of room for outside interpretation. The question then became how could he draw inspiration from the symbol without simply recreating it. He had essentially two options: option one being he could combine that symbol with another superhero symbol, or he could make his own symbol based off of the Superman symbol for a superhero that he creates. I don't think he was pleased with those options, and I wasn't able to see what he came up with in the end for reasons that I will explain later.

The class was going well and the students had a variety of sketches drawn from flowers to suns to puppies and even a dragon, however, in the final ten minutes of the class there was an unexpected fire drill! Some students had to leave early from the class, but were sent back by the music teacher with the news, which surprised the art teacher. She thought that the drills were all on days where she wasn't there, sadly this was an exception. She had to leave the room and figure out where the students were supposed to go while I had them start cleaning up. For the drill, the directions were given over the loudspeaker and everyone was directed to curl up under the windows in the main building so that in the event of a tornado, the glass would be blown over them causing as little damage as possible. In typical fifth grader fashion, there were some students who didn't take the drill seriously and got in trouble for laughing.

Once the drill was over and we headed into the classroom, one of the girls started to talk to me about the necklace I was wearing that day. She complimented it and I told her it was my mother's and she gave it to me a few years back. She shared with me that she occasionally borrows her mother's shoes because they wear the same size. While this didn't pertain to the lesson at all, I was happy that I could bond with one of the students.

The drill took up the remainder of the class and the students had to scramble to get the rest of their things packed up.