Travis and I played a game like this quite some time ago, but with a focus on numbers and letters more than the fish. Today, we just needed some silly fishy fun, and it turned out to be an interesting lesson in magnetism, too!

First, I cut out a fish template. Travis helped trace these onto construction paper and cut out.

Instead of hammering home preschool skills with letters and numbers this time, I invited him to draw on the fish. Silly smiles and scales soon turned into him being a fish doctor.

Oh no, some fish had polka dot flu! Or squiggle-itis!

For the fishing rods, tie yarn around one end of a dowel, and secure with masking tape. I tied a small magnet onto the other end of the yarn.

We set up our fish in the ocean, and raced to rescue them as fish doctors. I loved that he came up with this imaginative element to the game all on his own.

When he tried to rescue more than one fish at a time, he was disappointed the second one fell off from the small magnets we were using.

Hmm, would one of the bigger magnets we had around the house rescue more fish faster? Whoa, look how many we could pick up with this magnet!

Pretty soon, we were testing relative magnet strength in all kinds of ways, so all-in-all I’d say this was a great activity to help pass a rainy morning!