Fish Trading Cards
Getting to know the content of "The Fishes".

Objectives:

1. The student will become familiar with the content of the “The Fishes” section of the www.kidfish.bc.ca website through the creation of Fish “trading cards”

Materials Needed:

• Computers connected to the Internet
• Notebooks
• Bristol board cut into hockey or baseball card size
• Pencil crayons, pencils, rulers, fine tipped black felt

Activity:

Together, as a class, you may want to discuss trading cards/sport cards and look at some examples. Note how these cards are organized and what information they contain.

For this activity, students will create cards that will have the picture of a fish on one side and the fish’s “statistics” on the other side.

First of all, students will need to record notes about each fish. Which “statistics” they record could be decided on as a group or could be teacher directed. Some suggestions are:

colour, interesting/unique features, size, life span, spawning activity, interesting facts, and location. The students will also need to record the Latin name since it will be needed when labeling the front of the card. In their notebooks, have the students print out the categories under which they will take notes. This will be handy when it comes time to get the information from the website.

The second decision to be made is how many cards each student makes (and which fish they choose). Students could be:

• put in groups and asked to divide the number of fishes among them
• asked to individually make a certain number of cards
• asked to make a whole set for all the fish.

After all the plans and decisions have been established, have students connect to the Internet and go to www.kidfish.bc.ca

Once the students have accessed the website, they should click on the “The Fishes” icon. They should then examine the fish sections that apply to them. They should do a sketch of the fish and take notes in the categories that were decided on.

After this the final stage of making the cards can be started.