Tiddler the Story-Telling Fish

This activity is based on the wonderful story of ‘Tiddler the Story-Telling Fish’ by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. It’s a book which is a firm favorite with my son and after a recent trip to the Sea Life Centre in Weymouth I was inspired to create this activity.

The small world activity is based on one of the stages in the Attention Autism programme and is a type of activity I often did when I was a special needs teacher. This was a perfect literacy activity for my 2 year old but would work well with older children as well. The aim of the activity was for my son to create his own sea world, listen and follow instructions, use prepositions and build sentences to describe what he was doing.

I got everything we would need for the activity ready and laid it out on the blue material. I used blue aquarium gravel, the blue and clear vase pebbles, aquarium plants, sea creatures that I had borrowed from my sister, sea shells collected from a trip to the beach, a jug of water and two tupperware boxes. All of these resources I had from previous activities and can all be reused.

I used our blue felt material to make it look more sea like and put two towels under the blue material because I knew the floor was going to get wet.

Upstairs we re-read the story of Tiddler and I explained that I was going to show him how to create his own sea small world and then it would be his turn. Using clear and concise language I modelled and described each step of the process. My son watched and listened carefully and then it was his turn.

If your child struggles to process verbal instructions it may benefit them if you draw a simple now, next and then board so they have visual instructions to follow.

My toddler carefully and independently created his own sea small world by using the resources I had put out. The great thing thing with this activity was that there was no wrong step. It didn’t matter if he poured the water in first or the fish or the plants. I didn’t have to step in and take over. I could just listen and respond as my son used the language I had modelled to explain what he was doing; “blue pebbles in box”.

Once he had finished building his sea world we played with it together. It was a really lovely activity and we both enjoyed moving the plants and sea creatures around. The language and the sentences my son was independently using to explain what he and I were doing was brilliant.

Here are our finished sea small worlds. My son’s is on the left and as you can see his looks brilliant. I kept them both on the side and we revisited them throughout the day and the following day.

You could recreate this sea small world activity with any animals you have at home; a farm, safari, woodland. The possibilities are endless. We will definitely be doing this small world activity with our farm animals next week because it encouraged my son to follow instructions, build something marvelous independently and use the most incredible language.