Thursday 9 April 2015

Under the sea fish puppet and triarama performance


A while back,a colleague of mine, Clare Seccombe sent me this triarama picture of "under the sea" and I added it to one of my Pinterest boards  Janet's Language Learning.She was interested to know how I would use this triarama to create a piece of spoken performance and/or drama!Well here we go ....!

It is an ideal " under the sea" triarama for our Seaside project as part of our DFE funded WTSA/ JLN project.Find out more here Language Learning for Everyone and li ks really well with our other Seaside "fishy" ideas.

The triarama you can see in the picture is from a www.crayola.com blog post on colourful sea anenomes. You can find the instructions here in this blog on how to make the physical triarama.

My ideas below link this 3D triarama to the story book and the adjectives used to describe fish in this wonderful book: 


Setting the scene
  1. Read the story book to the class in French or German and share the wonderful drawings or create your own drawings and creative your own fishy emotion phrases in Spanish .Have a look at the blog post here to get a feel for the book and the ideas I have already written about.Fishing for feelings
  2. First create one large class triarama of an under the sea picture.Here is my class backdrop triarama.

Now let's focus on the adjectives.....


  1. Adjectives add colour to nouns and give nouns character.Look at the sea anenome in the centre of the triarama at the top of the blog post, that's so colourful! 
  2. On strips of coloured card as the children to write the phrase "I am ....+  an adjective  that describes a specific  emotion - in the target language.Ask them to select a piece of  coloured card strip that they think conveys the meaning e.g red - angry , green- calm, yellow- happy , blue - sad etcetra. 
  3. Now ask the children to concertina their card strips with the written phrases on them,to make a sea anenome in the centre of your class "Under the sea " triarama".



Time to practise "performance".
  1. Invite children to the front to select a coloured strip from our sea anenome and to mime the emotion that they can read and understand on the coloured strip.Can the class guess the  emotion?  
  2. Now we need to add the fish and build a performance.Ask the children to work in pairs and to create four fish characters of their own.Each fish needs a colour, a fantastical fish name and an emotion.Each fish needs a character conveyed by the way the speech bubble information is delivered
  3. For example here is a fish I have just made ......how would you convey the colour,emotion and name?


The grand class "under the sea"  performance!



  1. Ask the children to work on their tables (project tables would be best here so that we have a fair range of language speaking and writing ability on each table).The children on the table must  display all the fish characters and speech bubbles they have created.Each of the other children now selects a fish character to present in the class "under the sea" performance.
  2. They must attach their selected fish and speech bubble to a puppet stick, practise the way the fish sounds and moves and learn their lines!
  3. Invite each group with their fish to the front to use the class triarama stage set as their "under the sea" back drop for their "fish" performance!(Remember the fish puppet stick must have the fish and the speech bubble at the bottom of the stick as the child puppeteer will operate the fish from behind and above the triarama stage set) 



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