Pip: Art With Korb is back, and apparently so is the second quarter — which, if the first quarter is any indicator, will arrive and vanish before the clay even dries.
Mara: fjkorb walks us through what every grade level is tackling right now — photography, digital image-making, and ceramics — plus some bigger-picture changes to how students assess their own work. Let's start with what second quarter actually looks like in the studio.
Week 10: Second Quarter Hits the Ground Running
Pip: The question this segment is really answering is: what does the shift into second quarter mean for each grade level, and why does the pacing feel so compressed the moment you walk back in?
Mara: The post sets up the ceramics unit for eighth grade with real specificity — here's the line on wheel throwing: "The biggest challenge is going to be the centering, then the opening, then the pulling, and don't forget to keep the arms locked and the hands in place, and don't forget to breathe."
Pip: So the upshot is that throwing on the wheel isn't a single skill — it's a sequence of interdependent steps where each one depends on the previous one landing correctly. Miss the centering and nothing downstream works.
Mara: And running simultaneously with wheel throwing is slab building — students are constructing architectural forms, their own homes or another building that matters to them. The post even mentions a personal preference for Brutalist architecture from the nation's capital, which tells you something about the range of reference being brought into the room.
Pip: That's a genuinely interesting constraint — you're not just building a box, you're making a case for why a particular structure is worth your hands and your clay. Architecture as an argument.
Mara: Meanwhile, seventh grade is moving into Photoshop and the Visual Biography project. The post describes it as "a high end artwork with some high end computer skills" — layers, masking, tracing, importing, resizing. Students are starting with their own silhouettes and building outward from there.
Pip: Which is a real ask. Photoshop layers can humble a professional on a slow afternoon.
Mara: Sixth grade is wrapping up photography with CampSnap cameras and then pivoting hard — the final session is dedicated to the Elements of Art, vocabulary, and definitions. The post flags file management and working in Apple Photos as skills that matter just as much as the images themselves.
Mara: And threading through all of it is a rubric update — grids are being added to the self-assessment section to make them easier to read, with the existing checkboxes staying in place. Small change, but it directly affects how students track their own progress.
Pip: Assessment infrastructure quietly doing its job. From vocabulary and self-assessment, the through-line here is really about students building the language to talk about what they're making — and that's worth sitting with.
Pip: Three grade levels, three very different materials, and one consistent push to make students fluent in the vocabulary of what they're doing — not just the doing itself.
Mara: The clay, the pixels, and the photographs are all just different ways into the same question. More from the studio next time.
