Middle School Lesson Plan

Content Standard: Students will choose and evaluate a range of subject matter, symbols, and ideas

Achievement Standard: Students will use subjects, themes, and symbols that demonstrate knowledge of contexts, values, and aesthetics that communicate intended meaning in artworks.

Materials:

• Images of Native American pottery exhibiting repetition and negative/positive design (www.cmnh.org/collections/dept-cultanth-art.html will take you to the Cleveland Museum of National History, Cultural Anthropology, click on Tracing the Art of Pueblo Pottery. The last example has a description of the work and explanation of the design. The Hollister Collection of Southwestern Native American Pottery has 93 good images, but no explanations www.umass.edu/arthist/pots/main.html)
  
• India Ink, pens, paper
  
• Pottery making materials

Preparation: Review with the students their work with 2-d design principles that used repetition and the relationship of negative/positive design elements. Introduce them to Native American Pots. Have them analyze and research the use of black and white or brown and white symbols as ornamentation and as a narrative specific to the artisan and the culture.

Activity: Have the students develop symbols that could tell their personal narrative, e.g. sports and music may serve as sources for inventing these symbols. Next have them combine the symbols, stringing them together to form a negative/positive repetitive border design in India Ink.

Introduce the students to forming a pot. (See the Navajo Pottery Unit, Lesson 4). Have them decorate their pot with their design. Fire, if possible.

Have the students discuss the designs on the pots of their classmates and their possible meanings. Have them write a narrative to explain the relationship between the border and the functional vessel they created.

Assessment: Create, with the students, a rubric to evaluate: the pot design and construction, the clarity of the essay in explaining the symbol used in their design, and the use of the border on the pot. Include a picture of the pot and essay in the individual portfolios.

Another Motivation: Mangbetu Portrait Pots. Motivate the students by showing them a Mangbetu Portrait pot. Locate Zaire on the map and discuss the importance of Mangbetu portrait pots to that culture. Have the students decorate their clay pots by using clay to create facial features and incising hair and other details.

Gay Kohl, Paradise Valley District, Arizona