The Clay Teacher Blog: This post has seven days.

Friday, April 26, 2013

This post has seven days.

For older Canadians, this title might sound vaguely familiar.

Another busy week! I think the only people as busy as we are during April are accountants. However we are having much more fun.

Monday and Tuesday we were in St. Albert with Neil M. Ross. What a great school. We have been there so often over past few years that we feel almost like staff. We had 6 great workshops with the grade 5’s and 4’s. About 140 kids making Mother’s Day presents in two days. Wednesday and Thursday we were at Johnny Bright still doing Mother’s Day gifts with all the Grade 1’s. This time we made about 150 little candle holders for Mom.

The students really enjoy the wheel demo.

This morning was only a half day and we did 50 more Mother’s Day presents with Laurier Heights. This month we have made about 800 kgs or 1765 pounds of clay into gifts for Moms. That is a lot of clay projects for Mom. That is just for April. One has to wonder how many tons of clay projects is The Clay Teacher responsible for??

When we run as fast as we have been this last month, it is hard to keep up with the little things, like blogging. We meet so many wonderful little sparks in the classrooms day after day, it is hard to share as much as I would like. We did Lady Bugs a while ago with St. Maria Goretti. Maria Goretti is a very multicultural school. It has a real cross section of new Canadians. We were working with some kids that recently arrived from Africa. I was talking about the Lady Bug legs have to be as thick as your pinky. They had never heard of a “pinky” and talking further, they had never heard of a Lady Bug. So when we started having fun and adding hair and hats etc. they thought they had come to a very strange place. Why would you put a hair on a beetle or even want to make one out of clay? It is just a bug. Here is a very cute Lady Bug, weird or not.

Friday night. Time to get loaded….. the kiln, but we must get unloaded first. We still do a number of fired workshops and we must keep the kiln running to keep up and make sure all the Mother's Day gifts arrive on time. Here are the guys waiting to be unloaded and delivered on Monday.