Fish!

Our theme for summer reading this year is “Make a Splash,” so we’ll be doing water-based storytimes for the next seven weeks. This week’s theme was easy — fish!

We started off with one of my favorite books — “Hooray for Fish!” by Lucy Cousins.

The children loved looking at all of Little Fish’s friends. We had a lot of side chatter during this book — “That’s MY favorite fish! The stripey one, Miss Katie!” — but no one lost interest! When we got to the “How many can you see?” spread, we had several little ones just start counting out loud, so we took a break and counted together which was an excellent practice for our next book…”Fish, Swish, Splash, Dash” by Suse MacDonald!

I absolutely love this book — the counting is told in a cut-out format where one fish turns into two fish, and so on. Then, we you reach the end of the book, you turn the book upside down and count down from ten. You can turn the book rightside up again at the end and start over if you want to. I think if the kids were given the option, we would spend all of storytime reading just this book. But, we did move on to our flannelboard:

Flannelboard: “Five Little Fishes”
Five little fish swimming by the shore
One got caught then there were four
Four little fish swimming in the sea
One got caught then there were three
Three little fish swimming in the blue
One got caught then there were two
Two little fish swimming in the sun
One got caught then there was one
One little fish swimming straight for home
Decided he would never roam

I am trying to break out of my comfort zone by using more puppets. We sang this song with Pinkie the Fish. (The kids pretended to have their own fishes, but I should have had the foresight to make popsicle stick fish or something.)

Did You Ever See a Fishy? (Tune of “Did You Ever See a Lassie?”)
Did you ever see a fishy, a fishy, a fishy
Did you ever see a fishy, swim this way and that?
Swim this way and that way, and that way and this way?
Did you ever see a fishy, swim this way and that?

We settled back down with our next book: “Big Fish, Little Fish” by Ed Heck.

I used this book several times over the course of the summer and each time it was very popular with my storytimes and group tours. It’s such a short, simple story that really works wonderfully. Next up, an action song!

“One, Two, Three, Four, Five”
One, two, three, four, five, (hold up fingers one by one, while counting)
Once I caught a fish alive. (put hands together and wiggle like a fish)
Six, seven, eight, nine, ten, (hold up fingers one by one, while counting)
Then I threw it back again. (make throwing motion)
Why did you let it go? (hold hands out asking why)
Because it bit my finger so. (shake hand, as if hurt)
Which finger did it bite? (hold hands out asking why)
This little finger on my right. (wiggle pinky finger)

And we closed our storytime with “Fidgety Fish” by Ruth Galloway.

Our craft was very simple this week — fish scratch art! You can either make your own (most online craft stores sell “Magic Color” paper) and then you can die-cut your own shapes, or you can buy the kit online.