Ice Fishing

Looking for something different to fill your sensory tub with during a unit on Penguins or Winter Animals?  In this activity your little ones can pretend to be penguins and go "ice" fishing for thier food!  Just fill your sensory tub with packing peanuts (ice) and foam fish (penguin food) and encourage your little penguins to start fishing!

 Materials:  Sensory tub (or box), packing peanuts, foam sheets, tongs, scissors, sharpie

 Draw a fish shape on the upper left hand corner of a foam sheet. 

 Fold foam sheet in half.

 Fold in half one more time.

 Cut out fish shape.

 You should have four fish.  Cut out as many as you please.  Of course, the more children you have the more fish you should cut.

 You may also decorate them if you please.  If you want the search to be more difficult, cut fish out of white foam sheets.

 Hide the fish under the "ice".

 Make sure they are well hidden.

 Invite children to the center to go "ice fishing".  Provide each child with tongs. Using tongs is not only fun for them, it also strengthens their fine-motor skills.

 Children try finding fish using their tongs. You can give them a net or other container to set their fish in and then have them count how many fish they have found.

You can also program the fish with numbers, letters, or whatever you are practicing.

 If you have programmed fish with letters and numbers, children can categorize them accordingly and then put them in order.  Happy Fishing!!

Penguin Manipulatives

These penguin manipulatives can be used for a variety of different purposes!  They may be used in pretend play with the snow dough in my previous post, as counters, or incorporated into a literacy activity for beginning sounds like I will be doing tomorrow.  In this post I use contact paper to cover them and make them sturdy and re-usable for dramatic play purposes.  You may also laminate them if you have a laminating machine available to you.  If you laminate them, I would suggest you first back them with posterboard or cardstock so that they don't curl up. 

 Materials:  Contact paper, Penguin manipulatives print-out, scissors.

Here is the penguin print-out I used from Mailbox Magazine.

 Cut out penguins.

 Cut out a strip of contact paper.

 Take the backing off of the contact paper

 Cut out a piece of contact paper that will be big enough to place a penguin and fold some over to cover the penguin.

 Cut off excess contact paper.

 I used the penguins as a tool for imaginative play with the "snow" dough I made in my previous post.  Check my post tomorrow for more ways to use the penguin manipulatives.