Colour and Pattern with the Rainbow Fish
We started the spring term with a new Colour and Pattern theme and the shiny shimmering Rainbow Fish. The Rainbow Fish is a lovely story about sharing and the happiness that sharing can bring yourself and others. The story shows how difficult sharing can be and the impact that sharing can have on friendships. The Rainbow Fish story helped us to talk about why sharing is important in our Bears classroom.
For our Colour and Pattern topic, we have created a new Rainbow Fish display in the classroom. We painted and collaged shiny, colourful fish scales to decorate our Rainbow Fish. Rainbow Fish recognises he is special with his scales, every shade of blue, green and purple, with sparkling silver scales among them. So we thought, shared and wrote about why each of us were special. Finally, we added a large octopus with paper chain tentacles to our Rainbow Fish display.
Our role-play clothes shop has been a popular area of the classroom, with the Bears using their own experiences of shopping to adapt their play. On small world, we developed our story telling with an underwater Rainbow Fish scene and characters.
On the writing table, we created a colour word bank to use in our colour and pattern topic writing. We labelled the Rainbow Fish, then wrote a description. We are starting to use the phase 3 sounds that we are learning in phonics. We loved listening to the adventures of the Rainbow Fish and his friends, so we wrote about what was happening in a picture prompt from the story. Everyone could think of an interesting sentence and some of our sentences included adjectives!
On the creative table, we painted a wavy ocean background with blue and green paint, then added collage materials and attached a rainbow fish with a spring to create a 3D effect artwork. We also carefully designed a foil fish with a shiny scale design created by removing paint with cotton buds.
We made sparkly CD fish and colourful scale-patterned fish to create an underwater display above our carpet area. The Bears love it! There were lots of woos and wows when they arrived at school and saw their fish hanging from the ceiling.
Have a look at this video.
On the practical table, we modelled with playdough to create Rainbow Fish designs, before having a go at a clay version. We used tools to make textured patterns in the clay, and added googly eyes, shimmering scales and a coating of sparkly blue pearl paint. We created an underwater transient art scene with a little blue playdough fish and collage art pieces to add seaweed, corals and shells.
Later, we sculptured waves with paper and joined our sculptures together on the carpet to create a collaborative ocean for our clay fish to swim in. Our ocean was really very beautiful!
We had lots of fun exploring the cold winter weather while playing on the snowy playground. The Bears talked about how cold it felt on their hands and faces, and we talked about the crunchy sound under our feet as we made prints in the snow.
An opportunity to explore freezing by making ice decorations using natural materials. The children carefully chose leaves and berries to place in the water, sharing their ideas and making predictions about what might happen when the water turned into ice. We were very excited to check on our creations, but unbelievably, it wasn’t quite cold enough for them to freeze and be removed from their tubs! This led to a great opportunity for problem-solving, and we decided on Plan B — selecting a few containers to place in the school freezer instead. Some super scientific thinking as the Bears observed changes, made predictions, and learnt that sometimes experiments need adapting when things don’t go to plan.
Next time, colour and pattern with a patchwork elephant.