stART and Science Sunday: "The Rainbow Fish" and "Freddy the Fish"

I just love, love, LOVE it when
all the subjects I am going to teach my kiddos
integrate smoothly...

Tuesday was such a day for us...

The lessons for the day included the following concepts:

Friendship
Valentine's Day
Ecology
Getting Crafty (always a MUST)
and
Lunch

How did all these ideas come together so smoothly, you might ask?

Through a book, of course!

I began "tying together" these lessons by reading
"The Rainbow Fish"
by
Marcus Pfister,
which is a great way to discuss friendship...

After reading his story,
I moved into our ecology lesson
by doing an interactive story called
"Fred the Fish."

(If you click on the above picture,
you can see the story's details much better.)

The story is about a little fish named Fred.

(Fred is the bit of sponge attached to a pencil by a string.)

Fred lives in a beautiful stream that is protected in a Nature Preserve.
(Please note the beautiful "stream" Fred is swimming in above.)

However, Fred wants to go exploring,
so he leaves his safe little world to travel downstream.

(At this point, I had to attach something to Fred
-a clippy magnet-
to make sure he would stay in the water as he traveled downstream...)

As Fred travels, he encounters new areas of water,
all of which have been polluted in some way...

In each new place, the kiddos would help "pollute" the water
by dumping in different items into the "stream,"
depending upon what was happening in the story.

Here, Little Wild Man is dumping in soil run off
(dirt I gathered from outside)
from a local farm...

After a new item was dumped into the "stream,"
we would pull Fred out and see how he looked...

Needless to say, by the end of Fred's journey...

Neither he or his water looked so hot.

Poor Fred!

We decided to leave Fred in his new environment
and check in on him later...

Moving back to a happier "tail,"
we went into our craft and created Rainbow Fish of our own.

For the craft, we used the following supplies:

Paper plates
Paint/paint sponges
Paper circles
4 inch paper hearts
2 inch foam hear stickers
Googly eyes
Sequins
Glue

First, the kiddos painted their paper plates on one side...

(We used blue and purple paint
since those are the Rainbow Fish's colors.)

We then had to let the paper plates dry...

...so we took a lunch break!

We ate Fred...

and the Rainbow Fish.

(The Rainbow Fish's shiny scale is a piece of aluminum foil-
DON'T WORRY-
I made sure they didn't eat it!)

After lunch and dance lessons, we got back to our fish...

I cut out a triangle shape out of one of the sides
of the paper plate
to create the fishes' mouths...

The kiddos glued on a googly eye
and scales...

(The scales were made out of circles
which the kiddos cut in half to give them more of a
scale-like appearance.)

Next came the heart sticker for a fin...

(See...hearts...Valentine's Day!)

Add a few sequins for some sparkle...

...and don't forget to attach the big heart tail!

Our school of Rainbow Fish are complete...

Oh, and how did Fred end up?

Sadly, belly up...

Poor Fred

is

dead!

Why don't you swim on over to stART
and see what story art others have been up to this week?

If you come back on Sunday, I will also hopefully have this article
linked up to Science Sunday-
a great place to find ideas for fun science school
(and I'm not referring to a group of fish here!).