Paper Stuffed Fish

After Billy Kheel was finished with his week of working with Hassan Elementary, we have been inspired to create like Billy! My Kindergarten and 1st grade created a stuffed fish like Billy... but instead of felt, they used paper. 

Students first took the time to look at the Artwork that we had created collaboratively with Billy and they drew their fish out on a large format sheet of paper that had been folded in half. Some kids choose to create a fish in a very realistic way and others created fish from their imagination. 

After drawing and coloring in our first class, the second class was the stuffing. Students LOVED using a stapler... I mean really loved it.  Out of 250 students... I only had one kid staple themselves (and he survived to see another day... and probably learned not to do that again). I'm not going to lie... Stapling with littles does create some problems to be solved. I would suggest having refill staples, a needle tool (for clay) and a needle nose plyers... these tools will help you when "this stapler doesn't work". I have been able to 'fix' every stapler for several years through thousands of little hands using them.

The stuffing was successful for most students.  We used scrap paper and they loved ripping the pages to stuff. I kept stressing, "stuff GENTLY!"

The kids were sooooooo, soooooo, sooooo proud of their fish! 

I have a few more postings of stuffed fish from the past.  I have never done this with kids this young... It went OK... 1st grade was more successful than kindergarten for this project. Click here to see the previous post.