Teach Pottery: Trying Something New

Like many of you, Teach Pottery is cutting expenses. It is important to me to cut costs without sacrificing quality. With that as the goal, I am discontinuing use of a paid newsletter service. What I will do instead is keep up my Teach Pottery blog to keep you informed. You can subscribe to the blog if you like. I will also occasionally send you an email with a web page link.


Of course, the site is primarily for new teachers or for teachers who have never taught Ceramics before. So I hope that you will keep your new teachers in mind and forward the information on to them. Teaching a new subject is often lots of work. It is time consuming to create all of the lesson plans, visuals and handouts. Then there is always a bit of trial and error involved, too. Teach Pottery has all of the basic ingredients in modifiable format. It was created by me to make it easier for me to provide great lessons and it is made available to you and other teacher to, hopefully, do the same.

For a sample lesson of the new site that I am working on, click on the link of the right for May 9, 2010. You can use the links at the top of the page as part of that lesson.

A Lesson on Coil Pots from TeachPottery

This blog includes multiple pages. Links to the different pages can be seen above. The purpose is to bring to you a complete package of lesson plans, media for use in with the lesson, advice for incorporating technology into the lesson and everything else that you might need as a teacher to bring this lesson to your students.

I am testing out this format in contrast with the format on my website TeachPottery.net 

Please try it out and leave comments if you have some thoughts about it. I will also be sending out surveys about it if you are on my mailing list. If you aren't, leave your email and I'll send a short survey to you, too. Your opinion matters to me.

This package is for teaching a unit or a lesson on the incredible ceramic art of two ancient North American civilizations, the Mimbres and the Moundbuilders. It has historical context, current ceramic potters, enrichment activities and studio activities. 

The two videos below are media that can be used with the Basic Mimbres Bowls Lesson Plan. I hope your taste will be whetted to see more and use some of these resources.

Please leave comments on what you feel needs improving and what you would like more of or anything else you would like to communicate. Enjoy.

Creative Commons image of MImbres bowl from flickr

Image of Moundbuilder village courtesy of the National Parks Service

The Potters of San Marcos: The Clay and the Pot and Coil Bowl Demonstration

There are some excellent short videos on the web that are perfect for showing to your students, but how do you do that when video sites are blocked? I have found a very simple solution. There ios a great little Web 2.0 tool out there called Miro which you can simply download to your computer. It helps you to search out videos that suit your needs and download them to your computer. You can then use Miro to show the videos at school. Here's the link, https://www.miroguide.com/

This short video is an excellent introduction to the traditional hand-building method of coil. It is only a little over 2 minutes long. What a great way to start your class.





This narrated slide show is less than 4 minutes long and is an overview of how to create a coil bowl.