John Post

Sometimes art teachers struggle with what to teach kindergarten students. I know that I want first grade kids to be able to create sculptures using sphere, egg, cylinger and cone forms. For a kid in kindergarten, stacking up spheres to make a snowman, or attaching them into a string to make a caterpillar will be too challenging for some of them.

What I do to teach kindergarten students how to make spheres, eggs and cylinders is to have them make and add these forms to flat sculptures. I roll out a slab of clay and punch out a basic shape using a die or cookie cutter. The kids then make all of the detail parts like, eyes, noses, mouths, and scarves using geometric forms. They also learn how to score, slip and smooth clay forms together as they create these first simple sculptures. Even though these two lessons look very simple, they are great skill builders and help to lay the foundation for what the kids will do in later grades. In first grade, when kids make a more 3-dimensional snowman, we contrast that idea with these early flatter snowmen. The hole in the tops of these sculptures I make with a pencil when the kids turn them into me. It's so they can hang them on a nail at home. It makes it easy for a parent to display these at home.

I read books about to kids winter and snowmen as an introduction to this lesson and then we discuss the details that artists add to kids and snowmen in these books to convey the idea that it is winter time.

(These sculptures on this page are created using Rovin's RO-82 clay body and are glaze with my cone 1 white majolica glaze with colored glazes and underglazes brushed over the top of it.)