Something’s Fishy with #TBCCrafters

Say it Rah-shay By Rachee Jan 17, 2013 1 Comment

Last week I had the pleasure of attending workshops facilitated by Saroj Ghoting who literally wrote the book on early childhood storytimes (Early Literacy Storytimes @ Your Library: Partnering with Caregivers for Success). The workshops were trainings for the Every Child Ready to Read Initiative. ECRR research shows that there are six skills that children need to get ready to read (Print Motivation, Phonological Awareness, Vocabulary, Narrative Skills, Print Awareness and Letter Knowledge) and five practices to support the skills (Talking, Singing, Reading, Writing and Playing). The workshops gave us tips and ideas to provide young readers and their families with ways to experience these ideas.

My library created a please touch discovery station to focus on Letter Knowledge.
Fishing for letters based on this pin:

Source: joyfullyweary.blogspot.com via Rachée on Pinterest

To create a fishing hole of our own we used:

die cut of fish with Uppercase and Lowercase letters
paper clips
magnet
a dowel
string
hot glue gun
blue paper
large box
tape
box cutter
scissors

Optional: alphabet blocks

I gathered my supplies and my library assistants and we went to work. First we covered the box with blue paper. It looks like clouds because they are clouds. I did not want to use glitter as called for on the original web site and thought the clouds could pass as frozen water.

After covering the box with the paper, I used the box cutter to cut a hole large enough to be able to reach into.

I am fortunate to have access to a machine that has a stencil/die cut of fish so that we did not have to cut out the fish by hand but if you do not have access to such a machine, here is a fish template i found on the website The Activity Mom. The paper clips were attached to the fish and the fish were laminated.

One end of the string was attached to the dowel with the hot glue gun and on the other end, a magnet. Once assembled, it was time to fish!

We had alphabet blocks left that we repurposed from an old toy and added them to the station. The blocks can be used individually as another tool to help children recognize letters or to guide what can be fished from the hole.