Mister Seahorse {Eric Carle}

This week we hosted Family Literacy Night for our parents and each grade level was assigned an author to study.  Kindergarten got Eric Carle...woot woot!  All of the popular books were snatched up so I ventured to the library for something different.  And that is how I met Mister Seahorse.

This is actually a really cool book!  It teaches kids about different types of fish and how they carry their eggs.  Bonus if you really pay attention: all of the egg caretakers are the dads.  Interesting!

I knew I wanted to do something with camouflage because a really cool aspect of the book is that there are acetate pages {ie old school transperencies} that you have to look through to find the animals.  It's a neat lesson in camouflage because you can peek behind the painting to the fish that's hiding then cover it back up to see if you can see it once you know it's there.  The kids loved it.

Mom to 2 Posh Lil Divas had a neat seahorse activity so we got some white paper and started using watercolors.  I was a little nervous but the kids did great.  They had total freedom to use whatever colors they chose and I love how different they all turned out!

I cut them into seahorses after the painting was dry.  If we were doing this project later in the school year I totally would've done this camouflage activity from Mrs. Parker but it was a little too advanced for us at this point.

Instead we water colored blue paper with the same set of paints and the result was still beautiful colorful camouflaged seahorses!  {complete with sparkly dots of course}

Here are some other Eric Carle ideas from my teammates.  Feel free to pin them to your literacy collections.  I had so many author study ideas that I had to make a separate Book & Author Study board!

{The Grouchy Ladybug}

{The Very Hungry Caterpillar}

{The Very Busy Spider}

{Eric Carle inspired art}

Happy Reading!  :)