Unfolding Visible Learning: Students Capture Clay Education in Sketchbooks
Help me give my students the experience of documenting their learning in ceramics in their hand-made accordion-style sketchbooks, created with long sheets of paper cut with the GBC Paper Cutter (24 cut)!
FULLY FUNDED! Ms. Wood's classroom raised $435
This project is fully funded
Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month
This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because
it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.
My Project
I have been an art educator for 13+ years, and I encourage students to use sketchbooks in the classroom: as a place to jot down ideas, refine a concept, create observational sketches, reflect on their own progress. They function well, for the most part. But I have often felt that the actual learning that is happening is difficult to track.
Five years ago, I had the opportunity to travel to Reggio Emilia, Italy with a cohort of educators from the western United States.
We spent a week at the educational center with other educators from around the world and learned about the Reggio Emilia approach to education, where documentation and making learning visible are two main tenets.
This past summer, I participated in a two-day online workshop sponsored by the National Gallery of Art, and I learned how students can create their own accordion-style books, which can be used to capture learning in a really unique way: because they open like an accordion, students can look at four or 24(!) pages at once. This affords them a long view of all that they have learned and the chance to reflect on that learning by noticing patterns, coding specific types of discovery, and adding in new flaps and pages at key moments of understanding.
Because these books open up like accordions, they can stand up and serve as documents making visible students' learning.
For my Ceramics students to transform and annotate their books easily, they need paper cut into long strips. Currently, I have been using a small cutter that doesn't work well. The 24" paper cutter will be so helpful for cutting down large paper into the proper size so that my 164 students can increase the number of pages as their ceramics' knowledge increases!
More than half of students from low‑income households
Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education. Learn more
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Ms. Wood and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
