To prepare for Linda Sue Park’s author visit, the 5th graders at North read her Newbery winning novel A Single Shard, which is the story of an orphan named Tree-ear, who lives in a 12th century Korean potters’ village. Tree-ear desperately wants to become a potter, but he has to start out at the bottom as a lowly apprentice for a master potter named Min, chopping wood and doing chores. A group of us decided that we wanted to simulate the journey of an apprentice from doing hard labor to skilled work for our fifth graders, while giving them the experience of further working with clay. Sally Allan played the part of the taciturn master potter, silently throwing a pot at the wheel when the students entered the art room. When she finally noticed her new apprentices had arrived, she gruffly instructed them to grab a toothbrush and start scrubbing the art room floor. After a bit of hard work, the apprentices rotated through stations doing tasks an apprentice might encounter, like recycling clay, rolling clay, making coil bowls, and carving designs. They even had a chance to learn how to properly chop wood with outdoorsman Steve Cooper. Finally, our apprentices got a chance to try their hands at the pottery wheel, instructed by the master potter Sally. Brock Perkins and I played the role of journeymen, instructing them as they went along. Being humble apprentices, they weren’t allowed to talk, and if they did, they were given a toothbrush to continue scrubbing. Many of the bowls that the students created were glazed and donated to the Empty Bowls project. The experiment placed the 5th graders into Tree-ear’s mindset and readied them for the author visit, while also giving them experience working with clay and, of course, a little bit of hard labor!
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