Thursday, November 4, 2010

5th Grade Innovation

My 5th grade students just finished the first day of their miniature clay food sculptures.  We looked at pictures of Claes Oldenburg's  food sculptures, I showed two examples that I made, I demonstrated, we shared ideas, I thought everything was perfectly clear.  I was really impressed with some of the little sculptures they made!  Anyway, at the end of each class, I sat to the side and put the students' artwork on the shelves.  One student brought me a little snowman sculpture.  I was trying to think quickly... was it a chocolate snowman like chocolate Easter bunnies?

Me: What kind of food is this?
Student: It's not a food.
Me: Ok.... well, that was the assignment.
Student: (looks confused)
Me: That's why we looked at food sculptures, and talked about food, and I showed you food examples... you weren't really following directions.

Before I can think of what to say to him, because I at that point I was going to just let him have a different project, the student spins back around to his table and I hear him banging on the clay.  He turns back and shows me that he has flattened the clay snowman into a disk.

Student: It's a cookie.
Me: That works!

It cracked me up!

2 comments:

  1. Lol, this reminds me of a similar episode I had with a 3rd grader. I had been racking my brain to come up with a good project to use old CD's with. I finally came up with making abstract shattered guitars a la' Picasso and using the CD's as the center of the guitars. So I'm having the students collage a background to draw their guitars on and a student says to me "do we have to do guitars?" and I reply back "well if you can think of another way to use the CD as the center of something, than you could do that instead" (fully thinking that there was no way he could come up with something to use it for) and sure enough, not 1/2 a second later he replies to me "I could make a Ferris wheel with the CD in the center". Lol! I almost fell over, I said back to him, "well...I suppose you could...that's actually a really good idea!" The kids always have the best ideas...

    ReplyDelete
  2. I read this and promptly laughed out loud. This sounds like it could have come straight from my classroom. Sometimes kids really take you by surprise!

    ReplyDelete