Sculpture

In the reading Golomb compares drawing to clay referring to clay as a "reversible medium" that can be added to and subtracted from.  I think that the students enjoyed this aspect of clay, knowing that if something went wrong all they had to do was return to a ball or remove a piece or add clay. For the most part students seemed to thoroughly enjoy the project which I would attribute to the subject matter of the actual project and the medium it's self. Based on the excitement about working with the clay and the way the students handled it I would have to assume that they have not had a lot of opportunities to work with clay. I would agree with Golomb in saying that working with clay is often avoided because of its messiness, time consumption, and the space it requires.
During this project most students focused entirely on the front of the creature and ignored the back. Golomb talks about modeling of sides and how four year-olds already consider all sides of a clay creation. I think this may have been due to the amount of time the students had to work on their creatures and the type of sculpture they were making even though a few students to work on the back of their creatures by either adding pieces of clay or smoothing out the clay. I am really excited to see how they paint their creatures and if they put any detail on the other sides of their creatures.

Gender and Violence

Every since Saturday Art School began there has been a strange separation between the boys and the girls. Behavior in social situations, subject matter in drawing, and attention to work has been almost completely separated by gender. Duncum writes about the differences in choice of subject matter between boys and girls. He gives trains, superheros, battle scenes, and adventures as a few examples of what boys chose to draw in comparison to pets, flowers, butterflies, and gardens which girls chose to draw. The first week of class was the best example of this type of situation with most of the boys drawing things like knights and dragons while the majority of the girls drew pictures of themselves and the friends. This past week is the farthest they have gotten away from this that I have noticed, which I believe to be due to Halloween, students of both genders drew pumpkins.
So far we haven't had any violent images created that I know about, the closest we had to violent images what a sign that read "I heart blood" inserted into a altered drawing of a bedroom. One thing that I do notice a lot of is reproduction of images from the internet and t.v. which could lead to violent images. Gaye Green talks about the influence that violent media has on children focusing largely on the violence in the t.v. show The Simpsons. I think this could easily become a problem in a classroom that would be difficult to manage, but might be handled with the removal of free drawing. The removal of this type of assignment may get rid of a lot of unwanted subject matter but it may also hinder the creative process