A very exotic bottle fish!

It has been my intention for ages now to organise our daily learning activities around a central theme. Maybe not necessarily a theme-of-the-week kind of thing, because some themes may require a longer period of time to cover and others less, but you get the idea. I feel this will help me to more intentionally prepare learning activities and crafts at the start of each week, and give a little more structure to what we are doing.

So, I was doing the dishes on Sunday afternoon and wondering about what our very first theme would be. I had just used the last of the dish washing liquid and the empty bottle was standing next to the sink while I worked. I try to recycle a lot of our household junk into craft materials for Sweetpea or simple homemade skills toys for ArrowBoy these days, and so I was also trying to come up with an idea for using this oddly shaped plastic bottle for a craft. I had been eyeballing it for a while, and when I turned it on its side, I thought it rather looked like a peculiar kind of ....FISH! Aha! And so the theme for this week was born!!

As soon as the rest of the Joyful Family went for naps, I started prepping for the week's actvities...but alas, then Sweetpea woke up really ill on Monday morning and has been feeling far too miserable for doing much more than sitting on Mama's lap. She did perk up for an hour or two this morning, though, so here is what we did:

On Sunday afternoon I pre-cut the fins from an empty oats box, and also used a craft knife to cut slits in the plastic bottle where the fins would go.

While the children were playing this morning, I set up our craft tray with everything we needed. I find that this is the key to doing successful crafts with toddlers: have everything in one place, ready to go!

Sweetpea LOVED pushing the strips of red cellophane into the bottle - it was a super fine motor activity, too!

Painting the fins.

Painting white glue around the neck of the bottle. We attached a strip of orange felt for the mouth, and the eyes are craft foam circles on which Sweetpea drew some pupils with a black marker. We stuck  it on with white glue.

Ta-daaa! Our beautifully exotic bottle fish!

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