Big Wave Writing and Art

This was the picture from our Art a Day Calendar for January 6th. After looking at it for awhile and discussing the medium, style, and the Artist I decided my kids should use this for a writing assignment. I had them dig out their composition books and do a quick sketch of the picture. Then they were to come up with 10 or so words or phrases that would describe how one of the men on the boats would be feeling as the waves rose and crashed around him.

Ian got right to work drawing his picture. Sorry the photos is a little fuzzy. Then I had him just tell me the words and I wrote them. His words were:

Big Wave

Storm

mountain nearby

afraid

rowing fast 

scared

wet

splashing

salt in mouth

mist

people yelling

waves crashing

roaring

I admit I had to prompt him a bit in order to get him to come up with that many.

This is Sophia's finished product.

It was hard going at first. She went through several versions of the picture before she was even remotely happy with her drawing. She was in tears because she didn't think it looked good enough. And in this state she just refused to write anything. She is such a perfectionist.

She spent a little time in her room to calm down and then came back out and finished the assignment. What she came up with lovely. And she did it all by herself. No prompting or anything on my part. Well that might not be totally true since she most likely caught, despite the tantrum, some of what Ian and I were talking about when we were discussing the painting.

Stormy, wet, rocking boat.

Spray, noisy, hard to stand.

Waves, high, roaring and salty

Fisherman row hurriedly to shore

cloudy, starting to rain, cold.

pulling to higher ground

and....it's over.....

I like the idea of using these paintings and other artwork to spark images or stories or ideas for creative writing projects. I think we will revisit this assignment and others like it as we go through the year. Hopefully by the end of the year we won't have such a hard time getting started. Sophie likes to get attention this way for some reason. But obviously she can produce wonderful work so we just need to do it again and again until she is more comfortable with it.