Colour and Pattern with the Rainbow Fish
We started the spring term with a new Colour and Pattern theme and the shiny shimmering Rainbow Fish. The Rainbow Fish is a lovely story of sharing and the happiness that sharing can bring yourself and others. The story shows how difficult sharing can be and the impact that sharing can have on friendships. The Rainbow Fish story helped us to talk about why sharing is important in our Bears classroom.
For our Colour and Pattern topic, we have created a new Rainbow Fish display in the classroom. We painted and collaged shiny, colourful fish scales to decorate our Rainbow Fish. Rainbow Fish recognises he is special with his scales, every shade of blue, green and purple, with sparkling silver scales among them. So we thought, shared and wrote why each of us were special. Finally, we added a large class octopus with paper chain tentacles to our Rainbow Fish display.
Our role-play clothes shop has been a popular area of the classroom, with the Bears using their own experiences of shopping to adapt their play. On small world, we developed our story telling with an underwater Rainbow Fish scene and characters.
On the creative table, we made sparkly CD fish, and colourful scale pattern fish to create an underwater display above our carpet area. We painted a wavy ocean background with blue and green paint, then added collage materials and attached a rainbow fish with a spring to create a 3D effect artwork. We carefully painted a rainbow fish on bubble wrap with acrylic paint in the colours of the rainbow and designed a foil fish with a shiny scale design created by removing paint with cotton buds.
On the practical table, we modelled with playdough to create Rainbow Fish designs, before having a go at a clay version. We used tools to make textured patterns in the clay, and added googly eyes, shimmering scales and a coating of sparkly blue pearl acrylic paint.
Later, we sculptured waves with paper and joined our sculptures together on the carpet to create a collaborative ocean for our clay fish to swim in. Our ocean was really very beautiful!
On the writing table, we created a colour word bank to use in our colour and pattern topic writing. We labelled the Rainbow Fish, then wrote a description. We are beginning to use the phase 3 sounds that we are learning in phonics in our writing. We have loved listening to the adventures of the Rainbow Fish and his friends, so we wrote about what was happening in a picture prompt from the story. Everyone could think of an interesting sentence with great adjectives!
Have a look at our video. It isn't really windy in our classroom. I've added wave sounds to add an extra sensory element to our artwork.
Next time, colour and pattern with a patchwork elephant.