Kids talk, sounding like soft murmurs of a stream. The pottery teacher, Mr. Kolbo, calls for their attention, asking them to be quiet and not to be on their phones. Introducing the new project he holds up his finished examples of clay coasters. This is beginning pottery, with a basic simple project as an introduction to making slabs.

Of all the pottery projects and possibilities out there, how does Mr. Kolbo know what projects to do? “As a district we get together and decide what skills each beginning class should learn, then we decide what projects best demonstrate and use those skills.”

The class projects span various techniques, from clay coils to slabs. While there is such a thing as a coil extruder (think of a device just like little Play-Doh extruders, except on a larger scale), Mr. Kolbo believes in making the students learn how to make their own coils by hand. He told me of a time when a class depended on the coil extruder, and when the extruder broke, the students all stopped in their tracks because they couldn’t work on their projects. Mr. Kolbo believes the students need to learn to make their slabs by hand before using the slab roller.  A slab roller is just as it sounds: it is a large table with a wheel on the side of it, and a heavy roller that is used to flatten large clay chunks, thus making slabs with a consistent thickness throughout the entire slab.

In Beginning Pottery, Mr. Kolbo teaches the students all the necessary skills for making basic clay sculptures. In Pottery Two and above it is a little bit of a different story. The students are taught to actually use the coil extruder and the slab roller regularly, making the production of coils and slabs easier and more flawless and brings them one step closer to mastering pottery.