Smoky mackerel spread

The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister, North South Books, but if you don’t have it or can’t access a copy you will be able to apply the activity ideas to a text of your choice.

Activities here are provided for the specific areas of Literacy, Mathematics, Understanding the World and Expressive Arts and Design within the Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage, to provide a springboard for planning cross-curricular lessons appropriate for developing children’s knowledge, skills and understanding.

Introduce and share the suggested text.

• The Smokey Mackerel Spread recipe comes from the fish, meat, eggs and beans section of the Eatwell plate and, of course, the relevant ingredient is the mackerel.
• Check that the children know that mackerel is a type of fish.
• Look at a picture of a mackerel (or a real one if you can). The children will see that it is a pretty silvery fish with distinctive markings.
• Tell the children that you are going to tell a story about a fish that is even prettier than the mackerel, but that it is not a real fish.
• Show the children the front cover of the book, and ask them if they can suggest why the story is called The Rainbow Fish. Establish that the children understand what fish’s scales are. Ask if any of the children already know this story and, if so, invite them to share their memories of it.
• Share the suggested text with the children.
• After the reading ask the children such questions as these:
  • Where did the rainbow fish live? [a long way out in the deep blue sea]
  • What did the little blue fish want? [one of the rainbow fish’s shiny scales]
  • How did the rainbow fish react to the little blue fish? [he was angry and said ‘get away from me’]
  • Why didn’t the other fish want to play with him? [because he had upset the little blue fish]
  • Whom did the rainbow fish ask for help? [the starfish and then the octopus]
  • What did the octopus advise him to do? [give a shiny scale to each of the other fish]
  • How did the rainbow fish feel at the end and why? [very happy because he had made friends and found that sharing felt good]

• Ask the children if they can remember a time when they shared something. If they do, ask how that made the other person feel.
• Ask the children if they understand what is meant by a ‘prized possession’.
• If possible, show the children a prized possession of your own.
• Ask the children to talk in pairs about some of their most prized possessions.
• As a listening activity, invite the children to feed back and tell the class or group not what their prized possession was, but about what their partner said. This really encourages the children to listen to their partners.
• Invite the children to give a ‘shiny scale’ to someone and say why they deserve it.

• Ask the children to write a letter to the rainbow fish.
  • Talk about what message or question they would send and why.
  • Show the children the important rules about beginning and ending a letter.
  • Write a shared story about another rainbow animal to parallel the story shape and language structures – e.g. the rainbow bird.
  • Imagine that the rainbow fish’s scales are magical. What might he be able to do? Ask the children to write their ideas on fish-scale coloured bits of paper so that these can be collated to form a rainbow fish display.

• The author says that the rainbow fish’s scales ‘shimmer’.
  •  It’s a beautiful word. Ask the children what else shimmers – e.g. some fabrics, raindrops on the pavement, sunlight through trees.
  •  Ask the children to come up with some other ‘wow’ words and display them round a picture of the rainbow fish to develop their vocabulary.
  • A lovely expression in the story is ‘happy as a splash’.
• Ask the children to think of some other ‘happy as a… ’ expressions and display them on shiny scales.
• Play ‘Fishing for Phonics’ games in small groups.
• Make some fishing rods (they may be used for other games too).Attach a small magnet to the end of the string and put a paper clip on whatever you would like to pick up.
• Play with the phonic sounds you are working on. Ask the children to ‘fish’ for letters or words. If they can say the sound that the letter represents or read the word by blending, they keep it. If they can’t, someone else can try for a bonus point.