This fun activity is a great way to shift gears by getting your students’ noses out of their books. Perhaps the best part of all is how versatile this project can be – you can use it with just about any math problem, but it can be great for other concepts, too. Try fishing with vocabulary words or dates in history. Add the ideas below for incorporating bulletin boards, and you may be ready to go with an ocean theme for your whole room.
Use toy fishing rods (or make some out of popsicle sticks, or even small tree branches) and attach soft Velcro to the ends. Then you get a bowl (or anything resembling a bowl, ex. cup, jar, etc.) and place whatever “concept” you are teaching on a paper as the fish. You can even shape the papers like fish – making sure that the “fishes” have hard Velcro so that they can fish for them easily. For example, I did it with single digit addition. Each fish has a problem printed on it. Therefore, they fish for the problem and when they catch it, they write it down, solve it and if they get it right, they get to keep it in their own fish bowl (as pets per say). Their fish bowl is a construction paper fishbowl with soft Velcro on it so that they can attach their *catches of the day* in their bowls. Then the teacher can use them on a bulletin board as one huge fish bowl with everyone’s fish bowls or make it a Fish Store and have each bowl for sale (there you can transition to money). I made that activity up during my Student Teaching experience and they all totally loved it. They continued to ask me “When are we fishing again?”
Teachnet.com Contributor: Jany Mederos, Beginning Teacher, Miami, FL