Third Grade

Metal Repousse

Repousse is a metal working technique in which a malleable (soft and easy to bend) metal is textured and shaped by pushing from the backside to the front to create a design in low relief. Chasing is the opposite technique (working from the front to the back). Both are used together to create a finished piece. It is also known as embossing or metal tooling.

Students create a plate with a center image and four sections with different patterns. Then they add ink to the plate and burnish it off, creating darkened lines and indentations that make the patterns more visible. Next they glue the metal repousse on a black piece of paper.  Once it is dry, they draw out the patterns in the metal onto the black paper with white pencil. then they proceed to add colored pastels, making the 3-D texture into implied texture on a 2-D surface.

(The video below is for a middle school audience but I skim through it for the students.)

Wolf Kahn Landscapes

Third graders begin this project by looking at the color wheel and learning the beginnings of color theory. This includes primary, secondary and tertiary colors; tints and shades, warm and cool colors, complementary colors, and analogous colors. They create their own color wheel with the primary colors, and use white and black to tint and shade. These are added to the sketchbook they received this year.

Next we talk about Wolf Khan who was an American Impressionist and color-field landscape painter. They learn about atmospheric perspective, the illusion of foreground, midground and background in a 2 dimensional painting. For their project they create and paint a landscape in the style of Wolf Khan.

Coil Pots

Third graders watched a video of Maria Martinez, a Pueblo Indian potter from New Mexico who created highly polished black pottery that is now in museums. She made her pots from coils of clay she dug and processed with her son. They fired in a homemade pit kiln. (She is now deceased.)

Third graders learned how to make a round slab base, roll coils, use slip to join them and help to smooth the clay. Some experimented with the form of the pot, others tried using the coils in a decorative pattern. Once the clay dries and is fired they will glaze their pots. Then they will be fired a second time to finish.