Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Eric Carle's Rainbow Fish-Kinder Style



Without realizing it, I had done 3 lessons in a row involving fish or underwater creatures of some sort. The first, this one, is based on Eric Carle's book 'Hello Mister Seahorse. Basically we brainstormed things you would find under the sea. I showed them how to draw seaweed and let them draw and color in a background for their scene using crayons. We then painted over the backgrounds with watered down tempera paint (creating a resist). After that I had them use various large sponge letter stamps one of the teachers gave me over the summer and each students stamped a piece of tissue paper wit the letters to give it texture. I cut out a bunch of 'fish parts' or cardboard shapes that could be interchanged with one another to create whole fish. I also made a seahorse stencil so the students could trace and cut the the tissue paper from it. They had a really good time with the stamping and most of them were able to trace and cut the tissue paper, which is a pretty challenging thing for their little fingers given how easily it rips. All in all they did a great job. One of my few gripes in retrospect was that I didn't have the foam texture rollers which would have worked better than the stamps for creating texture on the tissue paper and that my stencil shapes were a little too small for the paper size. Next year, I'm going to go bigger and instead of just using pastel colored tissue paper I'll use the bright colors. I think that way, the sea animals will really pop!



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