Fish! Fish! Fish!

The question of the day was: Have you ever been fishing? Only one said no they had not, which is not surprising because we live in Northern Wisconsin where you can't turn around without running into a river or lake. I skipped the counting part because it was obvious which side had more (and I wanted to get started). One little guy could NOT sing the opening song because we had not counted the names. . . lesson learned. Just count them!

I started out with Ten Little Fish by Audrey Wood and used flannel fish to stretch the story out a little. Some of the kids noticed the rhyming patterns. They liked the ending with the ten baby fish. We danced to and sang Slippery Fish. Then I read Trout, Trout, Trout! (A Fish Chant) by April Pulley Sayre. It is a chant that lists many of the freshwater fish in North America. This was a fun one to read because it had great rhythm and the fish were actual fish (although they didn't have very fishy behavior). I was able to point out a few of the fish the kids had talked about catching when they were answering the question of the day at various points i the book. Then the kids helped me out with Have You Ever Been a Fishin'. This is a fun one to do because it gets faster and faster. Singing it without the CD let me have more opportunity to play with tempo.

I went to a storytime workshop last week and was inspired to try a poem at storytime. I modeled it after Jenna's performance of a Prelutsky Spaghetti poem she had told us about, but used a fish instead. We read My Fish Can Ride a Bicycle from Jack Prelutsky's Something Big has Been Here. Every time the word fish was in the poem, I held up a picture of a fish and the kids got to shout out, "FISH!" It was AWESOME!  The parents seemed to enjoy it almost as much as the kids.

The last book I read was This is Not My Hat by Jon Klassen. I explained about how it had won an award, which they could have cared less about. They did however LOVE it. I let the pictures do most of the talking and the kids were shouting out, "He's mad" and "That crab pointed to him".

For the craft, I chose to do something "risky" that I liked doing at the day cares. I put cups of soap with paint mixed into it on the tables and had them blow bubbles with a straw. When they had a lot of bubbles they had to squash a fish shape onto their bubbles. I really talked up the blowing into the straws part and made them practice blowing into their straws several times before I let them near the paint.

I guess I could call it a success, only two of the fourteen drank any soap :)