It was fun learning new things about elephants that I had never known. For example, did you know that an elephant can reach with its trunk, all the way down to its stomach, suck the water out from it, and use that to spray on its body to keep cool?! Madison and I found that very fascinating. A little gross, but fascinating nonetheless!
As is the case with us, we did many activities and projects dealing with elephants...
We made our elephant-shaped badges with our words to remember: "I will remember what God has done for me."We read quite the assortment of books for this unit!
"Elephants A Portrait of the Animal World" by Leonard Lee Rue III - there were tons of great pictures of elephants in this book! We didn't read through the book though, because it was quite wordy for a Kindergarten class. But we looked at all the awesome pictures and talked about them."17 Kings and 42 Elephants" by Margaret Mahy had great illustrations and a fun poem about some kings and elephants on a journey.
"Elephant Magic for Kids" by Anthony D. Fredericks included a lot of facts and information on elephants with wording that was easy to understand for the kids.
"What's It Like To Be A Baby Elephant?" by Honor Head - we read through this for our Science lesson"Elephant in the Bathtub" by Kristina Andres and "Stand Back, Said the Elephant, I'm Going To Sneeze!" by Patrica Thomas - we read these just for fun.
We read one of my favorite children's books, "Stand Back," Said the Elephant, "I'm Going to Sneeze!" by Patricia Thomas. I absolutely loved this book as a child, and discovered, that I still do! It was so much fun to read it again to my own kids. After we read it, I had Madison illustrate some pictures of a couple animals, what they looked like before and after the elephant's big commotion. She chose the giraffe, who ended up getting bent in half, and the leopard, who lost all its spots. I also had her pick an animal that was not in the book, and draw what she thought that animal might look like afterward. She drew an octopus, who's arms got all tangled up.
We spent quite a bit of time talking about where elephants live in Africa and Asia. We located both continents on the globe and we looked up the various countries that elephants can be found in, in our Children's World Atlas book. I also printed off an outlined world map and we labeled Africa and Asia on that map.
Madison did another word search for letter E words, and they colored an elephant picture.(word search from http://www.first-school.ws/t/word-search/alphabet/e-sh.htm)
I loved how my kids' hand print elephant pictures turned out!(idea from http://homeschoolcreations.blogspot.com/search/label/Letter%20Ee)
These cute elephant finger puppets came from www.enchantedlearning.com
I found a cute cut-and-paste craft idea using basic shapes to create an elephant. We also did an elephant-shaped dot-to-dot.(http://www.first-school.ws/activities/shapes/animals/elephantshapes.htm)
(dot to dot from www.makinglearningfun.com)
We read "Chickens Aren't the Only Ones" by Ruth Heller and made our foam lowercase "e" into an egg. It's not an elephant, I know. But it goes with the "e" theme. The book talked about various types of animals like reptiles, amphibians, and mammals, so it was a good basic introduction to that.(idea from http://totallytots.blogspot.com/2010/07/now-i-know-my-abcs-e-is-for-egg.html)
I didn't plan ahead for a clever elephant snack, so this is what I happened to come up with on a whim. Ham for the face, crackers for the ears, a couple broken pieces of Club Sticks crackers for the trunk, raisins for the eyes, and peanuts, for the peanuts. Not my greatest creation ever, but it worked.
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