Painted Fish

We started an Under the Sea unit with Kindergarten. I wanted to brighten up the display wall so I had them paint tropical fish.






Here is our display wall and the ocean we set up.

Please feel free to click on any picture to see larger.

















Materials Required:

white poster board
bright colored paint....we used liquid tempera
fish templates made from cardboard
white paper
black paper
glue stick
scissors
paintbrushes


I first had the kids paint the main body color for their fish.

I had bought some neon colored paint but unfortunately it turned out to be more like fingerpaint "paint". I ended up mixing it with liquid tempera with the same base color....fingerpaint is not very opaque.

Let dry.






I took some light cardboard and made some fish templates. These are quite large so I can't post them on Google Docs for you.




The kids then chose a template and traced it onto the back of their painted paper.

The large size of the template made this a bit of the challenge for kindergartners...a good challenge for their fine motor skill development.




They then had to cut this fish shape out....another good exercise to develop scissor skills.






Using a smaller paintbrush the kids painted on the finer details of their fish...I had some reference photos but the kids pretty much had their own ideas. It was amazing to see these fish develop.


I then had the kids trace out a large circle from the white paper and a smaller circle out of the black paper. They cut these out to form the eye of the fish. We glued them on with a glue stick.

I can't tell you how many were perplexed that the fish would only have one eye!




That's it. I saved all the leftover painted paper scraps as we will be making a "Rainbow Fish" as part of the "Under the Sea "unit.

see you next time

gail