Swimmy

Swimmy is a great book about sea animals learning to work together. It is full of beautiful and interesting art with language to match. The book describes Swimmy (the main character, a small fish) observing the world under the sea in ways like this, "He saw a medusa made of rainbow jelly (jelly fish) and "a lobster, who walked about like a water-moving machine...".

After reading the story we practiced using descriptive language ourselves. We looked at our clothes and came up with how Leo Lioni may have described us if we were colorful sea creatures. This activity did was a mind stretcher for the kiddos but it was fun to see what they said.

Tyson is the "race car friend"

Stewart is the "superpower fish"

Logan is the "dinosaur fish"

Trevor is the "straight face Jack o'lantern" or Logan said he could also be "candy corn" if he was wearing a yellow hat!  

 Luke is "Rain Kid" because his shirt is blue and has a hood

Blake is "Swimming Ocean Blue"

and Ava is simply "Buttons" 

We missed Miss Meg this day!

One of the fun things this book allows is the exploration of sea animals. We talked about the different sea animals (and their characteristics) mentioned in the book. We learned that jelly fish are symmetrical. Here we painted symmetrical rainbow fish, by painting one half and then folding it together. These turned out great. They did a fantastic job with this task.  

Sorry for the side view of this picture. More with sea animals...We graphed and counted our favorite sea animals from the story. The Big Bad Tuna Fish was the winner!

A few snapshots from snack time...

We missed Blake this day!

In the story, Swimmy is a small black fish who works together with a school of small red fish to scare off the large tuna. He is the eye, while the others swim around him in a large fish shape. Our busy bees worked together to stamp with paint the large red fish comprised of the small fish. They did a great job waiting their turn and working with others to make our extra large art!

Finished product! 

After the fish dried, we counted them and then practiced tracing and writing numbers.