Greek Vase

One of the homework for Year 5 last term was "Make a Greek vase", it carries a maximum of 10 points. Now that's a lot of points to score. The list of suggested homeworks for us to choose, varies from 2 to 10 points. It is up to us which one the children want to do, but they need to have a minimum of 25 points for the half term period between 2nd November until 15th of December. Which means, we need to submit a homework every week in order to get the minimum points. As a guide, 2 points is what the children score for half-an-hour's worth of work and they need to work for at least 30 minutes on any two days in a week.

Making this vase would be a good idea, it carries a lot of points and it would also be good for DS's motoring skill. Except, I have never done any vase or related craft work in my ancient entire life. So how to guide him? An email from one of the parent in the class saved the day. The parent was arranging for a pottery class from one of the Dutch Pottery in The Hague and she would like to know whether we were interested to join in. For the 2 hour lesson, the children would be doing their very own Greek vase and it only cost euro 15. DS jumped on the idea because that means he would be meeting his classmates and having fun playing with clay!!

For me, that means one homework completed in 2 hours time and I did not even have to scratch my brain and scream my head off  push DS to complete his homework, hooorayyy !!!!




Greek Vase by DS

Another view

It looks shiny after it's been baked in the oven. Below is how it looks before it's baked.

Before baking

At the end of the 2 hour lesson, the vases were left at the Pottery for the baking process and would be ready for collection after 2 weeks.

I managed to take a few vases by the other children as well.

This one is really nice

There were various shapes and decorations, but two things were very obvious as mentioned by the instructor at the end of the lesson, "The girls' vases are more decorative and have more patterns while the boys' ones are much more bolder in colours". One of the parent's comments was funny though, "It seems as if they have little controls over their hands. . . " hehehehe. . . .  But to be honest, I was amazed by the outcome. I wonder how the instructor and his one helper managed 17 children aged 9/10 years old through the whole process.

Let's see some of the kids in the class :

The instructor

Some of the kids, listening tentatively...

At the end of the session, all the boys at DS's table have yet to decorate their vases with Greek motifs hummphh. . . . I know, they spent the time talking and kidding each other mostly :D

Bila dah kena marah (by me of course), baru nak decorate!!!

Alhamdulillah, that was one very productive Saturday :D  But of course  DS still had to submit one homework (or a draft one) the following Friday, so I made him wrote what he did during the pottery class hehehehe. . . . I was actually curious and tried to understand how exactly they did the vase :D

He wrote a 2 pages decription complete with drawings (on my suggestion).

Complimentary note from the teacher

And received 11 points for the vase (every kids got the same) and 4 extra points for the writing and also earned 1 house point for his Gouda House.