Hokusai's "The Great Wave off Kanagawa"

Well, my internet has been down at my house since Saturday morning when my mom was "fixing" something that was working :) (thanks mom!) :) ha ha.

I'm having trouble uploading photos here at the library. I'll do that someday when our internet returns to normal.

So, from what I recall of the last class I taught, the children really got into making their waves. I did a few things to add to the experience of reading the book Hokusai: The Man Who Painted a Mountain by Deborah Kogan Ray. (And yes, I did skip the part that they have no record of his father's life, and his mom died when he was six.) So, I had them watch videos of ocean waves crashing on YouTube (carefully selected ones that had no expletives and no weird random happening interspersed among the awesome waves) as well as a shot of Mt. Fuji taken by someone from an airplane.  I wish I had the links, but alas I clicked out after class was over. I wanted them to get the sense of Mt Fuji as a real place, and the hugeness of it & the waves, too. I also used playdoh to make s pretend Huge Wave in the front of the table, with a Mt. Fuji way at the back of the table, that way when they stood in front of the wave they could see "in the distance" the Mt Fuji that I made. Well, they liked squishing the playdoh, especially my son, in the middle of me telling the story of Hokusai. :)

I'm not sure how clearly the concept of drawing a wave translated to these little guys, but they enjoyed making crashing waves nonetheless. I'm so happy they made it easier to persevere through my half-migraine during the class! They are a lot of fun.

Art History: We looked at Hokusai's "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" c. 1830. He is a Japanese artist best known for this selection from "Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji." He was influenced by a limited exposure to Dutch painting, and then himself became a precursor to Impressionism when those artists discovered his work.

Vocabulary: perspective

Art Techniques:  drawing an ocean wave