Lucky Goldfish! He's Celebrating Chinese New Year!

Jude decided he wanted to study fish for our next science chapter.  Coincidentally, next week is Chinese New Year, so we combined that into our unit study with several books about it, and both tied into our goldfish craft.

Our model was the Good-Luck Goldfish craft featured at Spoonful.com.  I printed out their template and cut it out for Jude to trace.  (I opted to cut it myself because it needed a little "fill in the blank" edging in some spots -- the template went outside my printer's margins.) Then we traced it onto orange paper.  Jude was able to cut it out with a little help in some of the tight areas.

Once it was cut out, I drew the inside lines onto our goldfish.  I just eyeballed at the margins.  Since we were going to add pompoms to make the scales (rather than cutting it out and adding scalloped tissue paper like the original), the edges did not need to be exact.  It just became a guide line for putting our "scales" on, so they stayed on the body and did not extend out onto the fins.

Gluing on puffy pom poms.  Dot, puffy.  Dot, puffy.  Dot, puffy!  Dot, puffy!
"Mommy, it's a pattern!!"  

(Ooh. Math practice, too.  Sneaky Mommy.)

Our colorful fish.  Glub!

Swim on over and see what's happening at: