The Rainbow Fish Printable Game

The Rainbow Fish  by Marcus Pfister is a wonderful book about sharing, and is a staple in many classrooms. Last week, my class wanted to read it over and over. Every time we read it, we talked about how nice the Rainbow Fish was to share with his friends. Every time one of the children shared a toy with a classmate, I said, "You shared like the Rainbow Fish!"

With all this talk about sharing and the Rainbow Fish, I wanted to come up with an activity that would allow the children to practice sharing. This is what I made. 

Besides being a sharing activity, it also allows children to practice their number as they match the scales to the appropriate fish. 

You can download the templates I made for the Rainbow Fish and his friends below.

I colored mine, cut them out, and laminated them. To make the scales sparkly, I just brushed them with glue and and sprinkled some glitter on them. Then I put five pieces of Velcro on the Rainbow Fish.

I also put one on each of his friends and on each scale.  

Then I used permanent marker to write a number on each scale and one on each of Rainbow Fish's friends. I made sure to give him one permanent sparkly scale for himself! Now the children can take the scales off of the Rainbow Fish and share them with all of his friends!

Here's the link to download my fish templates, which you can color and cut out: http://www.aspenleafpreschool.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Fish-templates.pdf

Simple Graphing

I read about this activity at teachpreschool.org and since our class is into counting and sorting I decided to give it a try. I used plastic bowls instead of baby food jars for the graphing materials because I didn't have enough jars in the classroom. The graph sheets I made on the computer. They are modeled after the ones used on the Teach Preschool blog. 

 Each child chose two bowls and arranged the materials from one bowl in the first column on the graphing sheet. 

Then they arranged the second set of objects on the other side of the graph. 

 After arranging the materials, the children estimated which column had more objects. 

 Then we counted each set of objects. 

 The children really enjoyed this activity and continued to work with it throughout the day. They loved choosing from the variety of math tokens and arranging them in the boxes on the graph.