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I’ve been given the opportunity to work with a special needs kid one-on-one and I’m teaching him #BlackHistory through claywork. Last week we discussed the history behind Southern face jugs—who invented the form, what they signify and their probable roots in the Congo. This week, I brought him a jug so he could sculpt the face. This child who supposedly has attention & behavior problems focused on the project peacefully for two hours solid. #Clay is the way.
in reply to Captain Jack Sparrow

Adderall's the closest thing to legal meth. Let that sink in for a bit. The closest thing to legal meth, is being marketed as a way for people with ADHD to keep focus, when the actual illicit drug which is its closest counterpart, is known to cause anxiety in its users among other things.

We as a society, sold the closest legal counterpart to meth, a drug whose side effects include anxiety, as a way to help people with ADHD focus, people...

And that's not counting how antipsychotics have been prescribed in the past as a way to calm people on the autism spectrum down, when those do way more harm than good in hindsight.

One-on-one pottery lessons as shown by Osa here, or even drawing, painting, papercrafts, even just open-ended sensory play in a mud puddle in the yard or a sandpit for that matter, just any sort of creative play in general, it doesn't have to just be pottery, are going to do better for neurodivergent people, that is to include both autistic people and people with ADHD, than any sort of drugs ever will.

in reply to Pottery by Osa

I learned today that my 12 y.o. student doesn’t know basic color theory. He couldn’t tell me which colors to mix to make pink, for instance. He remembered that it had been introduced when he was little, but he’d “never seen it in action,” as he put it. He never had art class.

It came up because he got to decorate his face jug with underglaze colors today. I used it as an opportunity to demo color mixing. Can’t wait to show you all the end result! But yeah… the state of public ed is appalling.

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in reply to Linda Rose Smit

@lindarosesmit He has a family and while that is a good point, I do remember being taught color theory from early childhood. I remember mixing paints as a child in school. My parents are immigrants and I went to a regular public school so I didn’t have a fancy upbringing.

I also don’t think it’s reasonable to ask parents to fill in every gap created by the lack of investment in public education.

in reply to Pottery by Osa

it goes both ways. Colourtheory is one thing. But never doing any painting at home is also worrying. When brushes were nowhere is sight ( they were always list) my mother would make a Qtip from cottonwool and a matchstick.
This morning 75 happy 4/5/6 YO at the exhibition. I am always surprised how much they know and how well they look at art and what they see.
in reply to Linda Rose Smit

in reply to Pottery by Osa

Public schools are particularly bad now to the point where I feel kinda bad for the current crop of kids as being part of maybe the last generation where public school didn't go to crap yet, and the AuDHD crowd, which I'm part of, have it particularly bad although the AuDHD crowd has traditionally never had it that great in the public school system even during my time going through it.

I had a relatively OK time of it, but even then in hindsight, the cracks start to show a bit, and now public schools especially in the US are trash currently, and in Oklahoma especially so, we're at the bottom of the list over here.

in reply to Wolf Munroe ☎

I didn't even learn to completely start drawing lineless until six years ago when I randomly tried it with my then-new set of crayons and liked how it turned out.

I had already known how to do lineless with chalk and oil pastels at the time and adapted the layer-blending-and-shading-a-solid-object technique I had already been using with those media to crayons, minus the finger smudging of course because crayon is a non-smudging medium.

in reply to LJ

Beyond that, which is something that's particularly beneficial to those in the AuDHD crowd, there's a lot of sensory benefits to it as well.

Like, any sort of traditional art or any sort of crafts are inherently forms of sensory play. eg. squishing about with clay or playdoh, making and squishing about with slime, or playing in a sandpit or mud puddle in the back yard, for example, or playing with paints, chalk, oil pastels, paper mache, etc, even just drawing with crayons fits here.