Let's Go Fishing!

Wow, it's hard to believe that we are already in our final weeks of school, and I only have two more precious days with sweet Ryan and Ethan.  Well, we are going to work hard and have lots of fun for those last two days!  This week we continued to learn about fun activities that we can do in the springtime, specifically going fishing!  Ethan and Ryan began their morning playing with beautiful gems of all colors in the touch and feel pool.  We talked about all the different colors of the gems (pink, purple, blue, yellow) and tried to sort them according to color.  We also counted our gems and some children told about their experiences of gem mining.

Open center time was busy, wet, and oh so fun as the boys played with squirting fish in one big tub of water.  I also added some cups and teapots for them to experiment with.  As they played, we talked about the fish, where fish live, and how people sometimes use fishing rods to try to catch fish.  We reviewed the colors of the fish and attempted (although not very successfully) to keep the water in the  tub!  When the boys tired of the water play, they also had the option of coloring a picture of a little boy fishing, stringing beads on a pipe cleaner, and of course cutting corner to practice their scissor skills!

Outside, the boys engaged in their usual serious game of shopping cart races, and they also pretended to swing like monkeys saying, "ooh-ooh, aah aah!"

For language circle today we read Gone Fishing by Earlene Long.  This is a sweet book about a little boy and his dad and all the things that they do and the materials that they use on their fishing days together.

After we read the book, I used picture cards glued onto paper fish that went along with the story to review what fishing is all about.  I asked the boys the following questions:
1. What do the boy and his daddy use to catch the fish? fishing rod and a net
2. What kind of food do fish like to eat? worms
3. Where do fish live? in the water
4. Who went fishing? a little boy and his daddy
5. Where does the daddy keep all of his fishing tools? in a tackle box
6. When do they leave to go fishing? in the morning
7. What do they wear on their heads to keep the sun out of their eyes? a hat

After we practiced answering all of these important wh-questions, the boys got to use their own fishing rods (made with a wooden dowel, string, and magnet) to "go fishing" for all of our vocabulary words (with paper clips on each fish).  As they caught the fish, they had to tell me the word on each one.  These words included bait, worms, fishing rod, daddy, fisherman, tackle box, net, big fish, and little fish.  The boys loved being fishermen!

We then moved to the art table to create our own fishing scene.  On blue construction paper, the boys painted their hands the color orange and then made a handprint on the paper.  We added a pipe cleaner as the hook and a piece of string as the fishing line connected to the hook.  Finally, they glued a googly eye and drew a mouth on their happy little fish.

We summarized our morning of fishing with the following short song: