Oksan Winter Camp- The Rainbow Fish...

4th Grade:

On the last day with the kiddos, I got an 80 minute block with each of the classes. This allowed me to do a longer lesson, which when doing art is sometimes the easiest to do.

I introduced new color words to the kids like I had with the kids at my school camp, but this time I had found colored paper in the colors that they were learning. I made squares of the colored paper and gave each student the collection of squares. Then, they had to find the colored square to match the color, glue it into their sketch book, and write the name next to it. I thought it worked out well. It gave the students something to do, and kept them on task while learning new vocabulary words.

The colors that they learned: 

burgundy, scarlet, salmon, fuschia, hot pink, coral, peach, rust, amber, vanilla, mustard, chartreuse, mint, olive, navy, teal, indigo, violet, lavender, eggplant, caramel, beige, and bronze.

My example rainbow fish...

   

             The project: The Rainbow Fish
I first started this project by reading the book. Since this school had a large budget to work with, I was able to order in 6 copies of the books for the kids to share among themselves. After the first 2 classes though, unfortunately I recognized that they were not able to understand the vocabulary of the book, so I used a power-point with easier vocabulary and it worked great!
After the book, we went over the parts of the fish. (fin, body, head, tail, eye, scale....) Then it was time to start the project... I gave them some fish shape ideas to encourage the students to use their imagination and create their own fish shape!

fish body ideas...

I had the students draw an outline of the fish in pencil first and trace over it with black marker. Then they colored in the head and tail with their colored pencil/crayon type things (I still haven't figured out what to call these in English).

I let the student pick out different colors of shiny paper that they would use to cut out the shapes that would end up being their scales. Most kids choose multiple colors. This was most likely because of the example that I put on the board....

They they were able to cut out their scales and start to glue them on their fish! It was really exciting and rewarding to look at all the different types and colors of fish! I love individuality! I had students that drew fish with extreme teeth. I had students that made small fish. I had students that made sharks. I even had a student that made a fish with a 6 pack... (more on that later...)

After they finished their fish, I had them cut them out of the paper and glue them into their sketchbooks. They also were required to drawn a scene and without prompting, I was excited about some of the creativity that was displayed! The fish bowl was pure genius! Why can't I teach these kids all the time again? I was impressed to say the least!

Now back to the abs... This is actually a funny story.
At the beginning of the week, I was warned that there was a student that likes to make everything very muscly! Jake told me that anything that the student was required to draw would end up with a 6 pack and tons of muscles. I forgot about this, and which student was the muscle-crazed one until class on Thursday! All of a sudden I put 2 and 2 together when I looked down and saw a fish with an amazing set of abs and pectoral muscles. I had to take a picture to show Jake that he was correct with his prediction!