With an exciting season filled with vacations, you may find yourself enjoying time near some water this summer. Fish, sand, and ocean creatures… oh my! Check out this easy fish craft below- perfect for a rainy day at the beach or inside activity to escape the summer heat!
Items Needed:
Paint (we recommend washable!)
Instructions:
Flip the dessert paper plate over and cut out a triangle along one edge.This will be the mouth of the fish! If your child is working on cutting skills, draw a triangle on the plate and encourage them to cut it out.
These training scissors can be very helpful when practicing cutting skills with little ones!
Paint the backside of the plate. The options are endless! Your child can paint a solid color, a pattern, or recreate a real-life fish they love (i.e. a clownfish!).
Draw fins on the construction paper and cut them out. You can make them any size or shape you’d like!
Glue the fins to the backside (non-painted side) to the plate.
Once the paint is dry, it’s time to decorate! Add the googly eye, tissue paper squares, and/or the pom poms.
Encouraging Speech and Language Skills
Counting
When gathering the items needed for the craft, work on counting skills. Tell your child “We need 4 pink pom poms” or “We need 3 yellow tissue paper squares”.
Another way to encourage counting skills is to write down numbers on the construction paper and cut them out. If your child is just beginning to work on counting, start with a small amount of numbers (i.e. 1-3). Place the written numbers and selected objects, such as pom poms, on the table. Have your child count the given number of objects that matches the number on the construction paper. For example, if the construction paper has a “3” on it, they should count and place 3 pom poms next to the number.
Descriptive Language
Make two (or several) fish and talk about the differences and similarities between them!
We love Who Will Win? books and Shark vs. Train by Chris Barton. These are excellent books to encourage comparing and contrasting various animals and/or items!
Story Telling
Encourage your child to make up a story about their fish. Remind your child to name their fish, incorporate details (i.e. location, other characters), and include a beginning, middle, and end!
Speech Sounds
If your child is working on a specific speech sound, find a word from the craft that has their sound in it. For example, if your child is working on the “sh” sound, focus on the word “fish”, as you make the craft. See below for some sample words to target with your child:
K/G sounds: glue, cut, googly eyes
SH sound: fish, tissue paper, construction paper, brush
S sound: scissors, glue stick
F sound: fin, fish
P/B/M sound: paper, pom pom, mouth, paint, plate
R sound: paper, construction, brush, scissors
Expanding Vocabulary
Talk about the parts of the fish (i.e. eye, fins, mouth, scales) or other creatures in the ocean. Read ocean themed books your child has in their collection or head to the library to find more books with an ocean theme.
Sing a simple, repetitive song or nursery rhyme with your child. We love the Slippery Fish Sing-a-long! Repetition and rhyming helps teach language, expands vocabulary skills, and encourages early literacy development. Not only can these songs encourage skills, they keep things fun and engaging, too!
Be sure to check out our Summer-Themed Book List and Beach Pudding recipe this summer, too!
If you have any questions about your child’s language, speech, reading or feeding development this summer, our team is here to help. We come to you! We provide speech therapy evaluations and treatment sessions at homes, in schools, and even summer camps.
Northern Virginia
Phone: 703-470-6957
Email: info@owlstherapy.com
Philadelphia’s Main Line
Phone: 610-579-0914
Email: philadelphia@owlstherapy.com
We hope you have a fin-tastic summer!