It’s another week of Summer Camp!!! This week I’m teaching Wheelthrowing again….
and the mud-covered shenanigans have started already!!!

So my campers this week learned TWO very important lessons… the hard way!

NUMBER ONE : Dried terra cotta is VERY fragile… and cannot be repaired.
Instead, any broken pieces needed to re-bulit from scratch very quickly!

NUMBER TWO : Put the lid on the underglaze jar before you shake it!!!

My Chess Camp kids have made it to their final day. All of their pieces have been made and all they needed to do today was paint them with colorful underglazes. So much fun to see their sets all set out in rows so they can paint in assembly-lime fashion. I gave them some directions… and a LOT of warnings about how fragile their dry clay pieces are at this stage. Amazing how some color can really bring their pieces to life!!!

Look at these… can you guess what characters they are???

Did you guess Luke Skywalker & Princess Leia???  —  ‘cuz you should have!

“GO” or no “GO”… Pokemon is still popular with the kids!!!

By the end of camp today, we had a little breakage, but successfully made it to the end. All of the pieces are on the carts drying, and waiting for one of the kid’s monitors to cover them with a thin coat of clear glaze. Soon enough, they’ll be fired and going home with the kids!!!

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Another good lesson for my campers… if they let their terra cotta dry too fast so that it’s no longer usable, we’re NOT going to toss it in the reclaim bucket. The easy-out. Instead, we’re drying it out and then they need to pulverize it so we can quickly turn it into terra cotta slip for them to use! Tough work… but it’s all part of the process.

Chess Camp is moving along smoothly. They’ve each been working hard building all of their chess pieces and painting their boards. Tomorrow is Friday… which also makes it their last day to finish everything up. Our plan is to paint all of the pieces with colored underglazes and hope that none of the pieces break along the way. If they do, there’s going to be some frantic re-building!!!

It’s been a long week and it’s only Thursday!!!
My Summer Campers have been working so hard making their chess sets. Each one has a theme and they’ve been building all of their pieces out of terra cotta clay. Some of them have been struggling, while others have been cruising right through. I just hope everyone has been scoring & slipping really well. Guess we’ll find out when their pieces start to dry, huh???

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Could they BE any cuter???

Some pawns are really piling up in Chess Camp… some better than others.
Some are just funny!!!

Not so surprisingly… my Summer Camp kids “once again” came up with the brilliant idea to have a Chocolate Chip Cookie Bake-Off on Wednesday. Kind of amazing to me how they continue to come up with this idea “all on their own” year after year??? Go figure. And every wonderful idea needs a great prize, right? So I built this terra cotta “BEST COOKIE” plate for the winner!!!

I just love when my Summer Campers hit their groove and dive right in. When kids who have never met each other start collaborating & working together. When they step-up and help teach each other how to do things. Makes my teaching job so much easier… and so endearing. I have some great kids this week!