Writing about Art

Okay when I first decided to include a major writing component in my lesson plans for the first half of this year I thought "This should be fun!" like banging my head against a wall fun. But stubborn as I am I forged on with this idea.
First I had to plan on what the students would write about. I always do clay before Christmas break and knew that the kids would be very engaged with this medium. So that would be the subject.
One of the major pushes at our school and district wide is to improve writing scores and many of the teachers at my school have extensive training the techniques used to promote student writing. I decided to work with Donna Tippin a 4th grade teacher that specializes in teaching writing. She helped me design the lesson and created the handouts that I gave the students in class to help them write about their clay bowls.

As part of the design of the clay project I decided to have the students create "Story Bowls" This allowed me to teach both pinch pot and coil methods. I also had the students add a small figure to their bowl. I thought that the bowl and figure could be made by most students in one class. The figure also gave them something to create a story around in their writing.

So now I'm working on reading and grading all of these stories of clay. Each of these milk crates contains one classes writing, 18 to 22 students ceramic tales.