We recently spent time exploring “under the sea” and the children created one of our old favorite paper plate activities – the polka dot painted fish…
We started out our morning reading Blue Sea by Robert Kalan.  We’ve written about this book a few other times and shared some really great art ideas related to it.  It is such a simple book with bright, vivid colors and pictures that it really inspires so many activities around the classroom!  Blue Sea is also a great book for introducing or reviewing comparative words like big, bigger, and biggest…
After listening to our story, the children went off to the centers. Â At the art table, they found paper plates, assorted colors of paint, and paint dabbers. Â There were also scissors, glue, and googly eyes…
Before getting started, Deborah showed the children how they could use the scissors to cut a triangle shape out of their paper plate. Â When stapled to one side of the paper plate, the triangle wedge would become the tail and the missing piece would be the fish’s mouth. The children thought that simple detail was pretty cool so they were excited to go off and cut out their own fish mouth and tail…
I think the best part of this process was watching the kids cut out their own fish mouth/tail. Â Every child’s effort to cut out the mouth/tail turned out differently. You may be thinking that this is a “cookie cutter art project” and perhaps in many ways it is but there was a lot of process behind this craft that interested our students starting with the cutting process and moving on to explore the paint dabbers…
The paint dabbers had been set out on the easel the day before, but just a few children had the chance to use them. Â So we set them out again with our paper plates to decorate our fish…
Some children chose to dab the sponges on their fish to make polka dots. Â Other children chose to smoosh the dabbers onto their paper, dragging it around to spread the brightly colored paint. Â Whichever technique the children chose to use, each child’s fish turned out terrific…
Some of the children chose to add their googly eyes right away, while others chose to add them after they had finished painting their fish…
When they were finished, we had the cutest polka dot painted fish with some of the best tails and mouths ever. Â One mom said her daughter was so proud of her fish and played with it all afternoon…
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