It looks like one of my classes this year is going to be a 6-7th blend class that runs for half the year instead of for a quarter at a time. I got to thinking that this would be the better class to do clay projects with because we would have more time for clay to dry (which takes a looonnnggg time in Oregon). I don't want to do an only clay class or even an only 3-D class. I think that working 3-D really pushes kids problem solving skills and I've found if we can plan in 2-D and then execute in 3-D then we tend to have more success on the 3-D project. I'm sure this also takes the highest level of Blooms to a whole new level and allows me to call some lessons TAG lessons. So I have been trying to think of good projects that produce both a 2-D project and a 3-D project. Of course we know I love Illuminated letters. I think designing a printer paper sized Illuminated Letter that uses your initial and a minimum of five images or symbols that tell about you is a great back to school lesson. Students can use a variety of media from marker to colored pencil to collage. You can get a good sense of where a students artistic level is from open ended projects like these. How are they doing with composition? With proportion? Using a chosen material. What is their grasp of color theory or shading I love to show my students these high school Illuminated letters from Ken Schwab not only because they are well designed but they are done in crayon! I feel they show the kids that if you take your time and use your materials correctly ANY material can produce great results. I am tempted to order a few of his lesson PDF's but he doesn't have any samples to let you see what the lesson you are ordering looks like. Big turn off for me. On the 3-D side you can then make a tooled Illuminated letter to teach low relief or you could make one of these large letters that I found while searching for student examples of illuminated letters. They come from Wilmington Middle School and there are only 3 photo examples. It took me a while to figure out how to make them with 30 kids at a time but once I got the three steps figured out I realized they are easy to make out of cracker boxes/tagboard and masking tape. I'll post detailed instructions for this lesson later. We used these as a Pop Art lesson last spring. Or we could translate our illuminated letters into clay slabs like they did here these are done by 6th graders at North Port Middle School Of course we can always have fun learning to draw people in proportion like we did with our disco rooms and then make a great plaster or paper machie figure in motion sculpture...there are so many great lessons about how to approach this. Some of us make wire armatures or tin foil armatures, you can cover in plaster strips or if you are broke like we were school paper towels and glue paste and tissue paper. No matter what, these figure seem to turn out better AFTER some drawing work with proportion Any lesson were students research masks, design a mask on paper and then create that mask in clay or paper machie are great. I'm loving the work that Mary Making and others are doing with the work of Kimmy Cantrell I see great opportunities to talk about African masks and how artist like Picasso and Matisse were also inspired by these masks. I also think the kids would love incorporating the hardware and keys and such. Mary's idea of using salt dough is really appealing to me as you don't have to put the hardware in the Kiln or pre or post drill the holes. I love the idea of having all the raw ingredients out for each table group, giving them a recipe for one student, have them do the math to make the recipe enough for their entire table group then go measure the ingredients and make the clay themselves. I feel 6th and 7th graders can pull this off. AND my new school still has the 1970's home ec room completely set up so I can send each group to their own "cooking" station. There is 3 ideas to start...more coming soon! What is your favorite way to go from 2-D to 3-D?