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.