3rd Grade listens to the story, "Rainbow Fish" and has fun cutting and tearing paper to piece together their very own Rainbow Fish.
I remember this story as a kid - morals of the story being about sharing, and keeping friendships, not being selfish.
Every table group had a "boat" (a paper tray with their materials), filled with pre-cut navy blue, orange and lime green rectangles. We started the project by transforming these geometric shapes into organic shapes. First, we cut an oval-esque shape for the body of the fish. Noting that every artist's oval might be different than their neighbor's, and that there are lots of different shapes of fish in the ocean.
We then cut out a trapezoid from a navy blue rectangle, and finally a rounded triangle for the fish's head. We glued these onto our papers using my "tap tap" method: tap tap your Q-Tip into the paper plate, then "tap tap" the edges of the shape that is to be glued down.
Every table also was provided with another "boat" filled with pre-cut small squares of all of the colors I could get my hands on! I demonstrated how to tear scales for our fish, and even showed them a fun short cut by tearing 3 scales at once, instead of one at a time. We glued these using the same "tap tap" method.
This project was a way for students to personalize their fish, they could choose color combinations if they wanted to, and their scales did not have to be a semi-circle shape. It was actually pleasing to see many students letting go of any notions of perfection, as they tore their shapes into organic shapes that simply suggest scales, without having the iconic "shape" of a scale.
At the end we had the chance to add tear or cut sea grasses using "wavy" or "zig zag" lines that we learned from our first Line lesson: Underground Lines. It was AWESOME to see this vocabulary compute, and carry over affectively into the shape lesson! Hurray :)
