“The Great Wave”: Analysis and Art by Savannah Abraham ’34 and Lauren Nunalee ’34
- Spark
Third-grade teacher Amber Sullivan and art teacher Amelia Karpowitz extended an ELA lesson analyzing Hokusai’s famous woodblock print to give students the opportunity to make prints themselves.
As teachers and students in the Lower School continue digging into the new English Language Arts curriculum, Wit & Wisdom, third-grade teacher Amber Sullivan collaborated with art teacher Amelia Karpowitz to extend a lesson on writing an analysis of a piece of art — Katsushika Hokusai’s 1830 woodblock print “Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave)” — to provide students with the opportunity to learn more about printmaking and then make prints themselves.
“In this lesson, students explored how artists represent the sea by analyzing Hokusai’s ‘The Great Wave,’” Sullivan explained. “They developed domain-specific vocabulary to thoughtfully examine artwork throughout our lessons, focusing on how an artist’s composition, line and color choices communicate a central message. Students concluded the lesson by writing a paragraph that analyzes the woodblock print.”
“This was such a fun project to do from start to finish. I truly enjoyed the opportunity to be inspired by the wide variety of art pieces used in the Wit & Wisdom curriculum in my own curriculum development,” Karpowitz added. “I was thrilled that the students became as excited as I was about this print, as well as the printing process. I was impressed with how they gained proficiency in drawing, etching and printmaking. They took several creative risks along the way and had many chances to turn ‘oopses’ into ‘oops-ortunities’!”
Sullivan’s students Savannah Abraham ’34 and Lauren Nunalee ’34 agreed that making the prints was a fun way to learn more about the piece of art they explored in ELA. Below is each student’s written analysis of Hokusai’s masterpiece and their chosen prints.
Savannah Abraham ’34
Lauren Nunalee ’34
About the Art Project
Inspired by Hokusai’s woodblock print, students pulled their analysis from the ELA Wit & Wisdom curriculum and added artistic knowledge to it. They learned how to make a print on a styrofoam plate and made a practice print, learning the printmaking process. Karpowitz led them in a drawing tutorial that broke down the drawing process step by step to learn how to draw Hokusai’s “The Great Wave.” Students then etched their own wave design on a larger styrofoam plate and had a chance to make at least two full-size prints. The young artists then learned how to create a reduction print by removing an element from their printing plate and emphasizing an element on one of their completed prints.
Along the way, the third-graders looked at images of authentic woodblock printing plates and watched a video of contemporary Japanese artist Keizaburo Matsuzaki creating ukiyo-e (the Japanese term for woodblock printing). They discussed what was similar and different between this authentic practice and this adapted one. Finally, students ranked their prints, chose the best two to display, and signed, titled and numbered them before choosing a background mount. One print will hang in their classroom space, and the other will come home ready to display in a home gallery.
Learn more about the Lower School’s new ELA curriculum in the Oct. 1, 2024, news story Lower School Rolls Out New Curriculum at Literacy Night.