The Great Wave - Creative writing workshop, Year 6 Week 1: Vocabulary development Inspired by Japanese artist Hokusai's masterpiece The Great Wave , Year 6 are starting on a creative voyage to bring the iconic print to literary life! We spent some time poring over the features of painting: the spray, the wave, the boats and, well hidden, Mount Fuji. After reading an account of Ellen MacArthur's sailing voyages, we began to generate some cutting edge vocabulary to give our writing some sparkle. This was the process: Children labelled the features of the picture, including parts of the wave (crest, barrel, swell, lip) We chose personified verbs for the different features. 'Grabbing', 'scratching' and 'grasping' for the finger-like lip of the wave; 'screaming', 'slapping' and 'whistling' for the wind. The group selected similes for each of the features. The wind became 'a bellowing dragon', the boats w...

Supply teaching offers me the chance to try out some interesting art ideas with children. Here are some great results from this week! Exploding 3D shapes drawn on squared paper with Year 6. Children marked out a vanishing point with an 'x'. They drew around a plastic 2D maths shape and then connected each angle back to the vanishing point. As one child pointed out: it's like flying above skyscrapers! Sketching and painting with Year 5 Free sketched images taken from famous art works and finished with acrylic inks and paint markers. The Lichtenstein is my favourite!