City of Santa Monica Youth Office

The Work of Our Hands: Hand Building with Clay 3

March 7, 2019 By Debra Disman

Hand Building with Clay class at Will Rogers Elementary School with the CREST Enrichment program has been a joy to teach.

Here behold first – fifth grade students get their hands in the “earth”…

The Work of Our Hands: Hand Building with Clay 2

February 27, 2019 By Debra Disman

Hand Building with Clay class at Will Rogers Elementary School with the CREST Enrichment program has been a joy to teach.

Below behold students aged 5-6 get their hands in the “earth”.

We had class on Valentine’s Day, which proved to be an inspiration.

From the heart.

The Work of Our Hands: Hand Building with Clay 1

February 24, 2019 By Debra Disman

Creating masks in our Hand Building with Clay class at McKinley Elementary after school with the CREST Enrichment program has been a joy. With majority boys in the class, the tempo had to be high energy.

Students learned how to “pound out” slabs (flat) pieces of clay the week before, then created “armatures” (support structures) of newspaper, over which they stretched their slabs, so that their masks would be three dimensional.

It was exciting to watch the students develop their mask characters, inevitably thinking in terms of story…inspired by characters from film, television, and books, but always their own. Students used coil, scoring, incising and even pinch pot techniques to create their mask characters.

Creating detail.