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I am creating a felt animal for my son for every letter of the alphabet in a new series: ABC Felt Animals!  We have had so much fun making these animals together — and they are helping him learn the phonetic sounds of the letters, so it has been very worth the time and effort put in to make these felt animals!

I think that God created an X-Ray (Tetra) Fish just so kids would have an animal to relate to the letter X. Otherwise, it’s just x-rays and xylophones, right?  (And boxes, axes, and foxes, if you’re thinking about learning to read).  Anyways, my son absolutely loved making this little fish and learning about skeletons along the way.

I have tried to be semi-precise with its colors.  A transluscent body, a white skeleton, an orange tail, yellow and black fins.  It is actually quite beautiful, eh?

All you need to make a Felt X-Ray Fish is:

• felt: gray, black, yellow, orange, and white
• cotton balls
• hot glue gun (or Elmer’s if you’re just using colored paper)
• amazing Fiskar scissors (if you’re going to work with felt at all, you have to check these scissors out!)

** This craft uses a hot glue gun — please keep out of the reach of children — these are for adult use only!!

This is the only way this makes sense to me.  I cut the picture I drew out (free printable at the end of this post!) into pieces. Then, I assemble all of my felt pieces — I cut two each of the body, the fins (with black stripes), the tail, and one skeleton (you could do two, but I only put it on the front).

Now begin to assemble and hot glue.  I just wing it and go as I go.  (Of course with my sweet John “helping” with his “hot glue gun”.)  I glued the skeleton on one of the bodies, then glued the fins together — a black stripe on the yellow.  I really could have not made these double, either way would be fine. Now I glued on the tail and the ready made fins. And stuffed one body with cotton balls and carefully glued the other body on top — I always use a fork now to wait for it to cool — don’t burn your fingers — it hurts!  Last, I glued on a little black circle for eyes and a little black line for a mouth on either side and he’s done!John loved this little guy. 

I made a template and a coloring page for you to make your own x-ray fish!  I am not an artist, but I hope you find this helpful!  

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You can download the X-Ray Fish printable here!

Book Extension

Alphatales to the rescue again.  This whole collection focuses on one letter at a time.  Super fun for kiddos.  We don’t own them right now (I used them when I taught kindergarten), but I really, really want to buy them!  A Xylophone for X-Ray Fish.  Perfect and fun.

Other Posts in the ABC Felt Animals Series:

T is for Turtle

U is for Umbrella Bird

V is for Viper

 W is for Whale