Zoe's artist grandma comes to visit with her AMAZING SCULPTURES

This is Zoe from Kindergarten. When we started our clay unit 2 weeks ago. She began talking about her grandma who is an artist. I told her to let her artist grandma know she was welcome to come share her craft with the class. Zoe apparently went back with my message and was able to set it all up in a week. Within a few days of my invite she was able to connect grandma, Karen Leighty and have her come to our class to share!

Ms. Leighty showed use several sized animal sculptures made from various mediums.
She placed her work on the tables for children to feel them.
Here she shares a bronze horse sculpture she had made.


This one if of a horse on the ground on its back. It looks like a metal sculpture, but we were told it was only painted to LOOK metal, yet it was clay.

Ms. Leighty answering amazing questions.

In then end, Ms. Leighty showed the kids two ways to make a clay bowls; pinch pot and coil method. Notice she is using the Elmo projector allowing all kids to see fine details of these bowl creations.

If you are a crafts person, artist or an art collector in the community and want to share children with your work, please e-mail me at Miriam.cutelis@yahoo.com. Also, thanks to Karen Leighty for coming. This was truly a very rich experience for the kids.

Kindergarten Finish their clay bowls (Welsh)

Kids in Welsh's K class just finished their clay bowls. They first began the unit with exploration, the next day they learned about making pinch pots and created the basic shape of their bowls and added tactile details using clay tools. When dry their were painted in its entirety in wither gold or silver. Last, kids used tiny detail brushes to add small decorative marks. We are now done....These will go home after the break.

Our 3D trees are DONE!!!! Ta da!!

I promised I'd post the pictures of the kids finishing up their tree and here they are. Notice our trees look amazingly sturdy. We painted the brown. We then created leaf printing plates based on real leaf sketches of trees right here at Murch. We then printed, trimmed and glued on these trees....only took six 45 minutes lessons.....but what a journey it's been.

This is a different Murch tree, hence the different looking leaves. After break I will take the kids out to the school and see if we can find our matching tree in the yard. Very exciting stuff!!

We've been asked to help with the set of Little Red Riding Hood, and these trees will be used in the set for two days. I will then have the children vote on where they could be placed on display.

Local Trees- Leaf study

Ms. Friedman's students in 3rd grade just finished a unit in printmaking of leaves of local trees. We got to sketch printouts of trees right on our very own Murch property. They later created printing plates of one chosen tree and printed out several copies to later trim and glue onto our realistic paper mache tree. I will post pictures of the finished tree in just a few hours.

These prints are so bold and beautiful. I love how amazingly different each one of them is. Look out for pictures of our finished tree in a few hours.

Each leaf is a different shade of green. Kids got to learn that they could alter the hue of a color by changing the amount primary color, white or black in that color.