Choice Based Art Education

I am looking for some help/advice/information from all of you art educators out there....

I am beginning to do some research on Choice Based Art Education. This is something that I would really like to implement at my school. I am easing into it this year, by giving the students a variety of options in their final products. I have not been able to give up complete control... yet. It is a learning process for me and for the students.

What the students have been creating so far this year has been wonderful and I would really like to learn more about fully implementing it next year.

Are there any of you who already do this??

It strikes me as very similar to the way I taught when I was in the content classroom (K-6 and multi-age) and I would love to get back to it! It seems like a very natural way of teaching. Ideas, suggestions???

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Retirement Centerpiece

 A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to have some students create a centerpiece for a retirement party for one of our district personnel.

Since we were working on such short notice, it had to be something that could be worked on before school (I pulled a handful of students who are here early) and it had to be something that I had materials handy for.

Ceramics!

 I used my extruder to create a tray full of coils. The students used the coils to build a bowl. I had them build it around a large plastic bowl that I had handy in the room, using it as a mold.

I have these cute little sun molds that the students used to add decorations to the outside of the bowl.

It dried pretty quickly, so I was able to fire it within a couple of days of building the bowl.

Once it was fired, the students chose the colors for glazing.

They wanted it to be bright, happy and colorful- blue, red, purples, yellow and orange!

I fired it one more time and am quite happy with the results of our spur of the moment, 1 week project!

I just happened to have some paper mache fruit that my first graders had finished for our Cezanne project.... Ta da!  A retirement centerpiece!

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