Sami Auster
Art Educator/Artist/ Student
Fossil Ridge High School
Settings And Context
Demographics
Community & Culture
Classroom Environment
Grades: 9-12
Student to Teacher Ratio: 19:1
Total Enrollment: 1,979 students
Total Minority Enrollment: 17%
Student Diversity
American Indian 0.4%
Asian 5.0%
Black 1.0%
Hawaiian Native 0.1%
Hispanic 7.0%
White 83.0 %
Two Or More Races 0.4 %
At the heart of Fossil Ridge's school culture are the RIDGE values – Respect, Integrity, Determination, Gratitude, and Excellence. These values drive every decision and interaction at Fossil Ridge and ensure that a healthy, thriving, and inclusive culture exists for all students. By defining the behaviors that are expected in all areas of school life, Fossil takes a positive approach to their students. Rather than focusing on what NOT to do, we focus and reward what we expect students TO do. PBIS relies on all staff in the building to reinforce, encourage, and teach positive social behavior. We reinforce and reflect the commitment to these values in a multitude of ways: our Advisory program, the four-year Rachel’s Challenge program, Diversity Leadership, and numerous clubs, athletic teams and activities. To further model and reflect the values they hold at Fossil Ridge, they have designed and implemented a Positive Behavior Intervention and
Support (PBIS) program.
At Fossil Ridge High School there was a total of four art rooms. Each art room contained a large wall made up of windows, places for students to store their supplies and projects, a smart board, a demo table, and sinks. The pottery room was equipped with a kiln room full of shelves for storage, a glaze room stocked with glazes and charts for possible glaze combinations, a wet storage room for students to store wet projects, and a clay room for storing clay and for housing a pug mill. The pottery room also contained a set of thirteen throwing wheels and three long tables for students to work and allowed for easy collaboration.
Advanced Drawing
Lesson 1
Black Out
Poetry
In this lesson students were given a random page of a book,
they then created a black out poem from their book page.
After creating the black out poem the students created
an image influenced by their poetry.
Lesson Plan
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Lesson 2
Automatic Drawing
In this lesson students created a playlist of 10 songs, then the students began to draw imagery based on the lyrics of the
songs they listened to. Every time the song changed
the students rotated the paper.
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Lesson Plan
Lesson 3
Switching Stories
In this project students typed up a 1 page story of an event in their life that had either a major positive or negative effect on them. I printed out the stories to keep the stories anonymous and then gave each student a classmates story. The students then created prints using imagery that represented the story they read.
Power Point & Vocab Sheet
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Lesson Plan
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Critique Images
Lesson Plan
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Pottery
Lesson 1
Drape & Press
In this project students learned about drape and press pottery. The students each created two drape or press bowls. One of the bowls the students kept and the other bowl the students donated to the empty bowl fundraiser.
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Lesson Plan
Lesson 2
Slab Mugs
In this project students learned about slab building. The students were introduced to 3 types of mugs: Cylindrical, tri-pod and darted mugs. The students than picked two types of mugs to design and created a set of mugs that went together.
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Ideation Sheet & Rubric
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Lesson Plan
Powerpoint
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Lesson 3
Coil Pots
In this project students learned about building forms with coils. The students then designed and built vases out of coils!
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Lesson Plan
Intro To Design
Lesson 3
Coil Pots
Lesson 1
Emotion Monsters
Lesson Plan
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In this project students picked an emotion they wanted to express along with at least three animals they wanted to combine to
create a unique monster out of clay. Each animals body was
made by making pinch pots.
In this project students learned about the Japanese art of notan's. They then created a notan of their own by cutting black paper and adhering it to a white background.