After listening to and watching the story, we set about creating an underwater scene at small world so we could re-enact the story with our friends using some stick puppet characters. We used the illustrations in the book to help us decide on which props to use, including shells and stones, blue fabric for the sea and green ribbons for seaweed. We even made a seabed using sandpaper! 

 

We created our own underwater scenes using playdough and collage materials and included the Rainbow Fish and the Little Blue Fish from the story...

 

.....and here we are working hard on making a sea background for our Rainbow Fish to swim in. We painted, collaged, coloured and cut and finally folded a cardboard spring to mount our fish on to the background so they look like they are swimming!

 

We used our artwork and illustrations from the book to inspire our writing. We described the Rainbow Fish and wrote about our favourite part of the story - where Rainbow Fish decides to share his shiny scales with the other fish and they all become friends. 

We used our soundmats and tricky wordmats to help us. 

 

We used a wide range of different media to create fish - paints - including acrylic paints on bubble wrap and on foil, printing using celery to create a scale pattern, pastels, felt tip pens and pencils. We also made collage fish from CDs.

We displayed our creations above our carpet area. We love sitting underneath our colourful fish art!

We worked as a class, each creating collage scales to make this Rainbow Fish........and we joined our paper chains together to make tentacles for this octopus!

 

Our early morning fine motor activities were all colour and fish-themed too. We threaded around the edge of a Rainbow Fish, made a fish by putting beads onto a pipe cleaner and did weaving on a fish using ribbons. We also placed buttons on a fish outline to create patterns, rolled playdough 'bubbles' and sorted pompoms into colours using tweezers. What a lot we do in the first ten minutes of the day!

 

The fish theme continued in our maths work. We were working on part part whole so made a whole Rainbow Fish from the parts - body, face, lips, tail and fins. We rolled a dice, used our subitising skills to work out what the number was, then collected the fish part with the matching numeral until we had a whole fish. 

We also worked with partner to find the Numicon 'parts' to make a whole fish.

 

Our number was 7 so we counted out 7 fish, 7 shells, 7 scales for fish........

 

.......and of course there are 7 colours in the rainbow so that was perfect for our Colour and Pattern theme! We made the Numberblock 7 character who is rainbow coloured, counted out 7 different coloured pompoms into a 10s frame, and practised writing the numeral 7 using the 7 colours of the rainbow. 

 

Our final creative project was clay fish. We needed the muscles in our fingers, hands and arms for this job as clay is much harder to work with than playdough. We warmed it up first by squeezing and squashing it, then rolled it out using a rolling pin so we could use a cutter to make the fish shape. Next we used a clay tool to create lines on the fins and tail, added a googly eye, and pressed shiny sequins into the clay. When they were dry, we used pearly blue acrylic paint to make our fish shimmer and sparkle just like the real Rainbow Fish!

 

We used strips of different blue papers and glued them onto a backing sheet, making a ripple effect to create these paper wave sculptures.

 

Our clay fish look like they are enjoying swimming there!

 

Can you spot your fish swimming in this shoal?