One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish

Here's another great lesson for read across america- I got it from the awesome site, Deep Space Sparkle and found it very successful & fun!  I did it with my first graders and they had so much fun drawing their fish! 

We read Dr. Seuss's book, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, which is actually a lot longer than I remembered it being as a child.  I did a directional drawing with the students where we all drew the fish together.  I broke down the fish into simple shapes.  A rainbow line for the top of the head etc. I did one example for vertical fish & one for horizontal fish.  We drew our fish with black oil pastel so there was no erasing which forced the students to take their time and learn to fix their mistakes and not just throw it away and start over.  In my art room we follow the mantra, there's no such things as mistakes!  I always encourage my students to take what they consider a mistake and change it into something new- some of the most famous artworks came to be that way. 

   After the fish are drawn we start to paint.  Each table is given either red, blue or green paint to paint their fish, after the fish are done I rotate the paint so that the stripes would be a different color.  I didn't have the kids draw the stripes, we just used big paint brushes and used the wideness of the brush to form the stripe.  I reminded the students to "jump" over the fish.  We switched the paint again and used the last color to do the eyelashes and lips.  Some of the girls decided to make girl fish by putting bows on their head which came out cute! All of the fish look like they have such personalities!

 In some of my classes I put glitter into their stripe paint to see how that could enhance their painting and I really liked the effect it had!  Overall this project enhanced their drawing & painting skills and produced a nice painting!