School of Fish Swimming Together Coloring Page

Six fish, arranged in three rows of two, with generous white space around every one. Look again though and they are not all going the same way. Those in the left column face right, those on the right face left, so each row reads as a pair meeting nose to nose.

Every fish is stripped back to essentials: a pointed oval body, a forked tail, a low fin on the back, a solid round eye and a short curved mouth. Four of the six also carry a leaf shaped pectoral. No scale detail appears anywhere.

A single small bubble floats in the middle of the page between the second row pair, the only mark that is not a fish.

Because the six shapes are so nearly identical, this is an unusually good page for practicing one technique six times over, or for running a color sequence: warm down the left column, cool down the right, or a gradual shift from the top row to the bottom.

It is also a counting page without announcing itself. The rows, the pairs and the two directions all give a child something to name before any color goes down.