Make this easy foil fish craft as part of an ‘under the sea’ theme or as seaside art. The foil presents children with an interesting material to paint on and you can make a whole ocean full of their designs. Plus: download our ready-made Seaside thematic unit and printables!
Save time with our ready-made Seaside teaching unit
Did you know we’ve got hundreds of ready-made lesson plans you can use to teach a wide range of thematic units? Save yourself so much planning time and choose your first unit from our Play Academy.
In our ready-made Seaside teaching unit for example you can get:
- a ready-made Seaside thematic unit
- bonus printables to make your teaching even easier
- a lesson plan to learn about the seaside
- lesson plans to play seaside math and literacy games
- a seaside play dough lesson plan
- a lesson plan to make a beautiful fish art project
- a lesson plan to create shell art
- bonus printables including a set of Number Fish for math activities, a set of Letter Fish for literacy activities, and a Shell Alphabet for literacy activities
- plus over 300 more individual lesson plans in 50 ready-made teaching units so you can easily teach an engaging and successful program that includes math, literacy, science, art, and more, all year round, year after year. Everything is planned for you and easy to find, saving you so much time.
Download your Seaside Unit here
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Easy fish art project for children
Let’s try one of our seaside art projects and make foil fish.
To make these fish you’ll need:
:: some card
:: foil
:: markers, oil pastels or acrylic paints
How to make foil fish
Begin by drawing a fish shape on a piece of card and cutting it out.
You can look in an ocean information book to discover all the different shapes that fish can be and pick your favourite. You could make a shoal of fish, all the same shape but with each child adding their unique design, or invite everyone to make something different.
Then wrap your fish in foil – we used kitchen foil wrap, nothing fancy! You can tear the foil a little, and fold and scrunch it, to get it to fit your fish shape.
Once your fish is covered in the foil it is then time to add your design. You can use acrylic paint, oil pastel crayons or permanent markers.
You can make any design you like. You might choose recreate the patterns of a real fish, or create one from your imagination. Swirls, stripes, scales – anything goes.
If you want to hang your fish as a mobile, apply a design to both sides.
The finished fish look great hung from a piece of twine in front of a window, where they can twirl in the breeze and reflect the sunlight.
Save time and get your ready-made Seaside unit!
Yes, you can do all the planning yourself if you want to, or you can head straight to our Play Academy and download our ready-made thematic units – including out Seaside Unit. That sounds like a better idea!
You’ll get a set of lesson plans all based on the seaside: learn about the seaside, play seaside math and literacy games, enjoy seaside play dough sensory play, make a beautiful fish art project and create shell art. Plus you’ll get fun printables to make your teaching even easier.
Come and join the Play Academy to get this and over 50 more ready-made teaching units, so you can easily teach an engaging and successful program that includes math, literacy, science, art, and more, all year round, year after year.
See more and download your first unit here.
This looks like a great project for our little guy.
Hope you have fun with it Carol!
I’m going to try this tomorrow with the kids I babysit. The girl is four years and the boy is eight. I think both of them will really enjoy this. Thank you for the great (and simple!) idea.
I was looking for a craft involving fish and I found your activity.I have never worked on foil before and couldn’t wait to try it with my four year old Jaybird. I didn’t let him use my Sharpies because he makes a mess when he uses markers, so I did that part but let him paint over everything. He loved it. We’ll do it again sometime. They turned out beautiful.
That’s so great to hear Sue. The foil is really interesting to work on, isn’t it. Happy you had fun with the idea!
I used this idea earlier in the week and this is wonderful. We had googly eyes even made foil jellyfish haha .
This is so great! It has inspired me to make our own foil butterflies.
Good and simple idea. Really helpful for my school competition. Selected for second round. Thanks for the greatest idea ever.