Another activity that was introduced during our week long study of fish was this simple-to-prepare but kind of complex-to-put-together rainbow fish puzzle…
I had lots of these sparkly sticker foam sheets left-over and decided to cut them up into fish shapes. So after cutting them up into fish shapes, I was stumped as to what the children would do with them. They were very bright and pretty but one peel of the sticker and the children would be done. So I divided each fish shape into four even pieces by cutting straight across each one. Â There, now the children could try to put the fish shapes back together kind of like a puzzle! Easy to do and interesting too…
I demonstrated for the children how they could use the shapes to create a rainbow fish as if they were putting together a puzzle and then sent them off to try it on their own. Getting to choose from all those bright sparkly colors and having the opportunity to peel off the paper to make a fish puzzle was certainly a big hit…
However, figuring out how to put the foam pieces back together to make a fish was the challenging part. None of the children put the fish back together the way I had intended or demonstrated. Instead, the children created their own unique fish which turned out to be much more interesting than my version of a fish…
Some of the children decided to draw bubbles and add other features to their fish…
I had intended to read the book “Rainbow Fish” by Marcus Pfister but since everything was running last minute for me, I couldn’t find my copy of the book anywhere. As a great alternative, we read “Fish Eyes” by Lois Ehlert, which is one of my personal favorite fish books, and which also happens to have fish that look very similar to our fish puzzles too…
In the end, we made at least 12 flashy fish puzzles!
Available on Amazon