Ona Armstrong
Pottery
About the Artist
Ona has a Ceramics and Elementary Education degree and a Masters of Arts in Teaching from Bennington College in Vermont. She has a passion for delivering academic content through the arts. Ona taught Kindergarten as a lead teacher at Evergreen Community Charter School for 13 years. Classroom management and quality instruction are her strengths from this experience. She owns and operates Firefly Valley Pottery Studio in West Asheville where she teaches children and adults pottery. She also operates an arts-based summer camp.
RESIDENCY OFFERING: Pottery around the world
Pre-K- 2nd grade
What different countries and cultures do you study in your classroom? Ona knows how to integrate pottery into your lesson plans seamlessly! Here’s an example: Studying the Cherokee people? On Monday, Ona will show a video of a Cherokee elder and teach about the Cherokee syllabary. We will get our hands in clay as we play “Simon Says” with clay to learn basic handbuilding techniques. On Tuesday and Wednesday, the students will then create Cherokee-inspired coil pots that have symbols from the syllabary or images from Cherokee legends. On Thursday, students will create informational panels about their clay creations for your school community. Friday will be our Cherokee pottery show!
Other ideas: Ancient Civilizations, African cultures, Latin American cultures, South American Cultures, Asian and Southeast Asian cultures.
Ona is available to work with Pre-K- 2nd grade, and will work with schools to ensure that each grade level has a different topic that we explore through pottery. Ona prefers to work with the entire grade level in your school over 2-3 days.
Goals:
Students will learn the history and culture of a group of people in your standards through pottery.
Students will learn basic hand- building pottery techniques including: slab building, coil building and pinch technique.
Students will be exposed to the art traditions of cultures that are different than their own.
Residency Outline
Day 1: Introduction
Ona introduces the cultural connection project with images/video from the culture they have been studying in the classroom after consulting with the teacher about what has been covered so far and their educational art integration goals.
Ona asks the class what they already know about this topic and what they would like to learn on a KWL (Know, Want to know, Learned) chart.
Students begin their project using basic clay hand-building techniques. For example, students could learn about the molecular makeup of clay and how to slip and score (glue pieces of clay together using runny clay/water and scratch it to make it stick forever).
Clay projects are stored in the classroom in wide, shallow boxes covered loosely with plastic to cure for the next day of work.
Day 2
Students continue and complete their pottery project.
Class will fill out the L of the KWL “What have we learned?”
Ona will bring home their clay pieces for drying, glazing, and firing.
Day 3 (two weeks later)
Ona sets up student art show in the library or other public space for parents, students and media if notified.
Ideally, work can be displayed in a safe public location within the school for a few weeks.