Jellyfish Art & Write

My son’s fascination with jellies hasn’t waned since we did our first jellyfish activity (check out the awesome tunnel book we made here). When I picked up Bob Barner’s book Fish Wish at the library for our youngest boy, I marveled at the amazing art – especially the two pages full of floating jellyfish. Barner’s book was the inspiration for this art project.

Supplies

1 sheet of thin white gift wrap tissue paper (or perhaps used dryer sheets?)

1 piece of blue paper

Grey yarn

Glue stick

Scissors

Pencil

White glue

Jellyfish body patterns (download the ones we used here)

Book

Before we created our own mixed-media jellyfish art, we read a wonderful book by Twig C. George.

What I loved about Jellies: The Life of Jellyfish is that it was written with a child in mind. (It starts “If you were a jellyfish …”.) It was hard to imagine a “bump and sting” lifestyle, but that’s precisely what George’s book had us doing. Seventeen kinds of jellies were pictured and identified, giving my son and I plenty to discuss about their similarities and differences. This book is, of course, non-fiction, but it read like a wonderful fiction adventure in which we both pondered living as a jellyfish would!

Writing

When we were done reading, we put the book aside, and I gave my son some jellyfish writing paper to record five facts he’d learned. (Writing is my son’s achilles heel, so whenever I can sucker him into doing it, I will.)

Download this writing paper here.

Art

Now it was time to make our ‘underwater’ masterpiece. I gave my son the patterns and showed him how they’d be put together.

Download a PDF of the patterns (top) here.

It was up to him to decide which jellies to make and how many. Now he traced the patterns onto the thin tissue paper and cut them out. (Cut carefully, the paper tears easily!) Note: In order to make it to swimming lessons in time, I helped with the cutting.

Once cut, we used a gluestick and layered the tissue onto the blue paper to make the jellyfish.

Lastly, he cut and attached random lengths of grey yarn at the bottom of each jelly as stingers. Some dots of white school glue did the trick.

The final result was amazing!