This week I am going to share a wonderful children’s book called The Pout-Pout Fish by Deborah Diesen. The pout- pout fish has a mouth that looks down turned. He decides that it means that he needs to be dreary all the time. The other sea animals try to get him to smile. He just won’t. He says he can’t he doesn’t have a choice. By the end of the book he finds he does have a choice and a wonderful smile if he will only swim upside down. (Spoiler Alert: A kiss helps make him smile too.)

This wonderful book is filled with rhyme you will love reading it all of the time.

How did we explore the book The Pout-Pout Fish?

Recycled Bottle Fish Mobile

We have a lot of sticks that fall from the trees in our backyard. JDaniel stores them in a beaver dam area behind some bushes. Whenever we need a stick, we just head into the dam and look for the right one.

Once we had found the right one, I spray painted it white and red to look like coral.

When we had applied enough tissue, we added giant wiggly eyes to the fish. Later when they had dried I added a piece of fishing line to each fish and hung the fishing line from the branch.

One night a few day later we put glow sticks in the fish to make them bioluminescent. JDaniel love having his Pout-Pout Fish glowing fish mobile in his room.

Starfish Math Game

We are trying to work on some basic math and reading skills this summer. One of the skills we have been working on is counting to ten.

To practice JDaniel and I sat down with some starfish game boards, pom poms, and a die. We each got to take turns rolling the die and adding pom poms to our starfish. The first person to get to ten was done and had to help the other person fill up the circles on their starfish.