The Rainbow Fish and "The Hat" App

This week and next in our reading program, Success For All, we have been on a unit called Water Wonders. One day we read the book The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister.

After we read the story students labeled the parts of the Rainbow Fish with a worksheet I found on Pinterest (of course!). It came from a blog called The Learning Parade. When they finished labeling they colored the fish with the exception of one scale that we applied glitter glue. Kids LOVE glitter and so do I!

 

 Click here for the worksheet!

During writing we wrote about the Rainbow Fish and did a craftivity. We used tissue paper and googly eyes. For the special scale I cut pieces of aluminum foil.

  

The next day we acted out the story. A co-worker of mine introduced us to a cool  and free application called The Hat that randomly selects students. The app can also select pairs of students and you have the option of saving and or printing out the results. We used it for our dramatization to select the roles of the Rainbow Fish, the Starfish, the wise Octopus and the little friend fish. Below is a picture of a screen of the app.

 

The children were super excited as the names were being selected. Below are the kids selected included the Rainbow Fish, the Starfish, our Book Holder (LOL) to help guide us through the story and the wise Octopus.

The students loved watching the story coming to life right in front of them. Now the kids wants to act out EVERY book and EVERYONE wants to be selected!