The Copycat Fish By: Marcus Pfister

Book Genre: Fiction

Publishing Info: Night Sky Books (24 pages)

Awards or honors received: N/A

Summary: It’s the first day of school and Rainbow Fish gets very annoyed that a small fish named Tug did everything that he did. Miss Cuttle, the teacher notices this taking place and in the middle of the story has the students completing a task. She groups the children and puts Rainbow Fish and Tug together. Their job was to create a beautiful garden border for the school. Rainbow Fish was not happy and told Tug to go away and do his part by himself. Tug told him that he wanted to be like Rainbow Fish because everything he did was good. Rainbow Fish felt mixed up, he was so mad that everything he did got copied but on the other hand he understood what Tug was trying to say. So Rainbow Fish decided to worked together with Tug to complete a beautiful garden. Miss Cuttle was very pleased how well they worked together and Tug and Rainbow Fish became best of friends.

Personal rating and reason for rating: ***Good. The Copycat Fish is a great story to introduce a new vocabulary word. (Copycat) I also like this book as a teaching tool when I teach the children that just because their friend is doing something that is going to get them in trouble, they don’t have to do it also. This is a hard lesson to teach in kindergarten. The reason I gave it a good rating instead of a great would be for print/book size. The particular book that I read was a small paperback version and was hard to read the words and just in general the picture size was small. Overall though a great teaching tool that lends itself to many teaching activities.

Reading level: Accelerated Reader Level 3.4 (3rd grade 4th month)

Interest Level: K-2

Possible uses of the text in integrated units of study:

Writing/Art: Give the students a fish template on white construction paper. Next, give each child a handful of little torn pieces of tissue paper. Students will then glue each piece onto the fish template making it look like Rainbow Fish. We will then glue the completed fish template onto a large white sheet of construction paper with a line for the children to write at the bottom. Students will need to complete their setting with their Rainbow Fish and write 1-2 sentences describing their setting. For example: The Rainbow Fish is colorful. He is swimming with Tug.

Math: I would give each student a cup of beans. Students would need to sort the beans in groups of fives and tens just like the fish did in the story. At the end I would let them glue their beans onto a piece of construction paper to make a design. Each student would tell us about their design. Extension: I could also give them a different variety of beans and they would have to sort by color.

Reading: Before reading the story I would ask the children if they knew what the word copycat meant. I would then proceed to explain the word and give them examples. I would then ask the students has there ever been a time when someone copycatted you and why do you think they did that? Get the children thinking before we read the story.
After the story is complete I would ask comprehension questions (HOTS) to check for understanding. Then we would complete a flow map of main details that happened in the story.

Potential problems or difficulties: I do not see any potential problems.