Ocean ideas

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Ocean ideas
By Rose Ann

I teach 2nd grade and am presently beginning an ocean unit with my little ones. One idea that I do every year is to let them make an underwater scene by using thumbprints on blue paper. They print their thumbs five or six
times.The next step is to let their creativity come into action.Challenge them to make their prints into fish by adding eyes, fins, gills, etc. You would be surprised what they can come up with. I encourage them to use things that we have talked about in class such as kelp, sea anenomes, coral and sponges.
Another fun thing that I do and the kids seem to like is to make fish

from newspaper patterns that I cut out. They trace and cut two each from newspaper. I staple together and they stuff with crumpled newspaper. Then I staple it shut. The next step is to give each student about 30 brightly colored circles about 2-3" in diameter. They overlap these circles "scales" and cover one side of the fish. I give them one white circle and a smaller black circle for the center of the eye. Hang multi-colored streamers from the tail and hole punch in the top- add a pipe cleaner - now your ocean fish is ready for hanging.
Hope you enjoy these ideas.