Balancing Curriculum and Materials

Back in February 2013, Arts & Activities featured my article titled "Balancing Curriculum and Materials."  The article focused on how to time up your lessons throughout the year (so you don't have too many heavy-ended material projects at once) and managing sculpture materials.

The theme of February's magazine was clay, and since clay is the least used material when pushing carts from room to room (so I've heard from many art teachers), I wanted to share how it is possible to work with the tricky material without a classroom.

I based parts of my article on an older post I had written back in 2012 titled Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture, Oh My!  .  When pushing a cart from room to room, it's tricky to balance the excess materials on the cart, and I had found a few tricks to balance the load.

One of my biggest keys when working with sculpture materials on a cart was student help.  In the morning, I would leave the materials in the classrooms with the teachers, and once the classes were cleaned up and finished, I would have students carry the materials to the next room, or place the bin of sculpture items in my storage room.  Cleaning took a little longer than normal, I just budgeted in more time at the end for clean up to get all the clay off the desks!

How have you managed to work with clay while traveling?