Rainbow Fish

 Kinder: Rainbow Fish

Kinder students listened to the story Rainbow Fish by Marcus Phister. Students then drew the fish based on the book. They drew on white cardstock. We did a step-by-step for this. It helped to mention "leap frog hopping" for the scales. Students did this with black sharpie. The next day, students added liquid watercolor to their fish..again based on the original colors of rainbow fish. I LOVE liquid watercolors, as I was able to order the exact colors for this project.  I would say the accuracy was 100% there. I'm a big fan of good quality colors. So I was quite happy with the results. Students also glittered a few of the scales to make them special and sparkly. (again, based on the book).

 We also looked at some photos of what real ocean floors look like. They are full of starfish, coral, seaweed, fish, oysters, shells, crabs, etc. Students drew an ocean floor with oil pastels and colored in. This was done on 12' x 18" good quality drawing paper (80lb). I also told students they could create "fish bubbles" by drawing circles with the white oil pastel on their paper. The next day, they painted the ocean with blue, blue-green, then "water-painted" the top to get a nice shade of very light bluish green. This worked very nicely. Students cut out their fish. We used "pop-outs" (3-d foam stickers) to adhere the fish to the background. I found out (the hard way!) that kinder students do not do well with pop-outs as the backing of each sticker is hard to peel with their  little fingers. However, I went around and assisted and it all worked out.

Aren't these just so amazing to look at? Great job Kinder!