Portholes

Materials:
- Construction Paper
- 2 Circle Tracers (One larger than the other)
- Watercolor Paper
- Blue Watercolor Paint
- Paintbrushes
- Green Tissue Paper
- Glue / Glue Sticks
- Hole Puncher
- Scissors

For this particular class of mine, I have a large group compared to the rest of the other class sizes. It is quite the challenge to have them all listening to me at the same time. Every time I have them, I try to do a lesson step-by-step, but there are always students who are just much faster and others that are much slower.

This time, I decided to visually write the instructions out on the white board. This way, I had the students try to solve what the next step was and a student got to erase a step as we completed them. For the most part, it kept everyone engaged and at the same pace.

1. Using the smaller tracer, trace a circle onto the watercolor paper.

2. Paint in JUST the circle with blue watercolor paint.

3. Cut out seaweed squiggles and glue onto blue circle.

4. With our ellison cutter, I had cut out diamonds, triangles and squares. I demonstrated to the students how to assemble these to make fishies. About 2/3's I'd say understood, the rest kind of made their own fishy shapes, which is perfectly fine :).

5. Glue onto blue circle. With all the extra white space around the blue circle, use a hole puncher to punch out some dots. You only need a few for each fishy. These will be their bubbles. Glue onto blue circle, too.

6. Using the larger circle tracer (we used a paper plate), trace and cut out a circle onto construction paper.

7. Cut out water scene and glue onto construction paper. Draw circles around edge.