stART: Swimmy

I've been watching Michelle's blog, A Mommy's Adventures, for a while now. I always love her stART projects and ideas. I've been waiting for some fantastic idea to cross my mind so we can participate. Sometimes, I just want to come up with things on my own, instead of copying from other people. It's so much more satisfying.

One of the books we are reading this week is Swimmy by Leo Lionni. I love the artwork in his books! Swimmy is the story of a little black fish who lives with a school of little red fish. One day, all the little red fish get eaten by a bigger fish, and only Swimmy escapes. He swims through the ocean, seeing lots of new things, and finally finds another school of little red fish. He wants to show them everything he's seen, but they're afraid they will get eaten. So Swimmy teaches them to swim together like one big fish, and they scare the bigger fish away.

I love the look of the little red fish. They look like they were stamped onto the paper. So I took some craft foam, double stick tape, and a peanut butter jar lid, and made a fish stamp.
We used red paint to make our little red fish.

I let E stamp the fish all over the paper. I helped too, stamping is fun!

Then we let it dry. Later in the day, I cut it out and we mounted it on plain blue paper. Maybe the next time we read the story, we'll make an ocean scene with a seaweed forest stencilled from doilies like the author does. I had no doilies available this time, so plain blue it was. E also colored an eye black. I decided not to get out more paint for her to make a black Swimmy eye, I'm pretty sure our red fish would have turned completely black.

To see more stART projects, check out Michelle's blog here.