In addition to many life skills, the kids at the Minnow program are learning about letters! This week’s letter was P, so today we focused on creating a “Pond”.
Everyone started with a piece of blue construction paper. We discussed what a pond was, what sort of creatures live in ponds: aquatic plants, frogs, fish, lily pads, aquatic birds, insects. Using crayons everyone drew the background for their underwater pond environment. After instructions on how to draw some plant life and rocks the kids had a chance to add whatever pond elements they wanted in their individual pond! (For example someone added an alligator, and another added a jellyfish (which lives in the ocean but is still aquatic!)
In order to save time and facilitate more coloring, I precut some long 1″ thick strips of paper from paper shopping bags. On each strip I cut a slit halfway through the width of the paper about one inch from the end of the strip. One slit on the right side of the paper near one end, and one slit on the left side of the paper near the other end.
We had the kids color their strips of paper, then fold them and link the ends of the paper together by sliding the slits together. Then we glued the folded paper fish onto their pond environments (putting glue along the bottom edge of the fish ( this part is a little tricky and does take some time to dry.)
Then we placed all the little ponds together to dry on the table, as a big pond!
