A Fishy Story

I've been having a fish-themed couple of weeks. It started with making 'floaty fish' taken from Usbourne Books Summer Activities. I did them with a Year 2 class and they turned out really well. Dead easy to make, and ideal for supply as you only need coloured paper or card, tissue paper and glue sticks.
So that got me thinking about cross-curricular learning and I bought a copy of The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister. I love it, the illustrations are fabulous and the story lends itself to numerous lessons.

I did a very basic lesson on 2D shapes and gave the children Rainbow Fish blanks to draw scales, so that Triangle Fish had triangular scales, Circle Fish had circular scales and so on. I combined a bit of a review of 2D shapes and counting backwards from 10 by drawing a Rainbow Fish on the board with a variety of different shape 'scales' and got children to rub out one at a time and we all counted up how many were left.
Then I decided that was a bit 'bitty' and changed it to a lesson on subtraction:

That worked well, although I'd probably differentiate the worksheets for different abilities another time.

I was pleased with my literacy lesson.  We read the story, stopping to talk about how Rainbow Fish felt and why he acted the way he did.  Then we did a hotseating activity, where I got a child to volunteer to sit at the front and be Rainbow Fish, wearing a sparkly silver sequinned shrug, while the others asked questions.  Finally the children thought of some words to describe Rainbow fish and wrote them on paper scales and coloured them, which I then stuck on a Rainbow Fish outline:

Learning point for next time: make sure the children have the scales the right way round before writing on them - a lot of these are upside down....