Students make clay bowls to fill stomachs

MAT-SU - A little pinching and spinning of clay at Colony High School is filling shelves at local food banks and nurturing students compassion.

Key Club members there are involved in the International Empty Bowls program, in which participants make and sell bowls to help feed hungry people.

Colony Key Club members, craft survey students, and anyone who wished to lend a hand, recently made clay bowls that will be sold Nov. 27 at the schools Christmas Bazaar. The local chapter of the Kiwanis Club will cook vegetable, caribou, and moose soups, while Key Club members will bake rolls.

People who come to the bazaar will be able to choose the bowl they like, and purchase it with an all-you-can-eat option of their choice of soup. The bowls will cost $8 for adults and $4 for children.

I think that it will go really well, said Melody Mann, a Colony High School Key Club organizer and art teacher, whose students are working on the project.

Colony Middle School students from Debbie Buzdors business partnership classes, with the guidance of art teacher Debbie Myers, recently made 125 bowls and sold the bowls with soup and bread in October, at the schools concert.

After the middle school students repaid the school for the clay they used, they had earned a $300 profit, which they promptly donated to the Palmer Food Bank.

It was a great lesson for the kids, Myers said. Once we got them going, they really took off. They did everything themselves they were waiters and cashiers. It really worked well. Before this project, most of the kids thought of community service as a punishment. But they really enjoyed this. They even got a letter from a well-respected restaurant telling them what a good job they did.

Encouraged by Colony Middle Schools success, and Palmer Junior Middle Schools success last spring, the project was launched at Colony High.

Mann wants her high school students to create at least 250 bowls.

This will allow us to split the profits between the Food Bank in Wasilla and the Food Bank in Palmer, and still make a nice contribution, Mann said.

Bowl-making techniques used by the Key Club students earlier this month ranged from the basic pinch-pot method of rolling the clay into a ball and then hollowing out its center, to the more advanced method of using electronic pottery wheels.

The students who worked on the wheels found their main difficulty lay in keeping the clay centered on the apparatus.

If the clays not centered, it wobbles, said club member Sarah Hansen. Then, when you start to build your pot up, it collapses.

Even with the delicacy required, club member Eric Van Dongen preferred to work on the wheel.

Sometimes you make a perfect pot right away, but other times it can take a couple of hours. Its fun to see what you can do . . . You have more control with the pinch-pots, but the wheel is more of a challenge.

Even as Key Club members struggled to create the bowls, they remained optimistic. Its a creative idea, Hansen said. I think people will really like it.

*The trick, said club member Moriah Miles, is to create something thats pleasing to the eye, something thats a little different, without being too weird.

Key Club members agreed almost unanimously that this has been their favorite project. Not only does it have the potential to be very helpful to the local food banks, but it is also fun.

Youre an adult, said club member Lindsey Burton, and you get to get your hands dirty.

Judging from the clay-encrusted kids and clay-spattered floor, her statement was accurate. Its not what I expected from community service, Burton said. This is a lot more fun.Photo: Eric Van Dongen and Lindsey Burton, members of the Colony Key Club, make clay bowls to be sold at an upcoming bazaar to earn money for area food banks.

Photo by CLARE BALDWIN.