1st Grade Clay Fish

We began this lesson by reading the book This Is Not My Hat by Jon Klassen.

While reading the book I asked students to be on the lookout for the shapes they saw on the fish and the parts of the fish that made it a fish.  Throughout reading the book students raised their hands eagerly to point out that fish have tails, fins and gills as well as the fact that we could only see one eye from the side and that the fish didn't have a nose.  Of course I could have told the students all this stuff but part of every reading I do is to get the students to actively participate and think critically about why artists/illustrators make certain decisions.  The story is also very cute!

Students began the project by cutting the outline of a fish out of a slab of clay, adding all the part we had discussed + texture and draping their fish over a cup to dry.  Rather than having flat tile-like sculptures I thought it would be fun to give our sculptures some implied movement.  Below is the result after they dried but before we added color.

To the dried clay students added color with oil pastels (to prepare for a water resist) before we dipped the fish in a bath of blue ink water.  Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of this because my hand were covered in blue ink at the time but imaging students amazement as their colored fish went into the blue water and then came out with all the raw clay covered in blue while the oil pastels resisted the ink. 

Checking for understanding

 As students waited to have their fish dipped in the water I asked them to describe to me why their fish could swim.  This gave me an opportunity to see if they had thought about the parts of the fish discussed in the previous class and how they help the fish to swim.