Elmer the Elephant Week!

As promised, although sorry it's a little late, here is some of the great stuff from our last week's theme unit - Elmer the Elephant by David McKee! We read 6 of the Elmer books, voted on our favorites at the end of the week, and completed daily "following directions" art projects along with worksheets that tied in with our math work!

Bar Graph - "Elmer" (the original introductory book) turned out to be the winner!

Some of the group art-work was just too cute to take down, so I hung the mosaic "team-work" Elmer and our Handprint Herd together over the cabinet in our room! Love the idea of a "We are one awesome herd" bulletin board or door display, but this is what I had space for and I'm thinking it'll stay up for a while!

 By the way - that mosaic Elmer was such a cool project! The kids really got into it... I made one big elephant cut-out on black butcher paper, cut it into 8 sections and each student was responsible for mosaic-ing his/her own section with help from an adult if needed. Then we had to work as a team to put all of the pieces back together to make one big "patchwork" patchwork elephant! I just LOVE it!!

Last but not least, here is a quick pic of 2 of the worksheets I made to go with our read-alouds. On the first day, we read talked about descriptive words and colored elephants differently for a "Special Day Parade" and of course, counted the elephants too! The second pic here is from Day #4, a review of some pattern-making that we had touched on in math lessons throughout the week - students completed letter patterns and then made their own elephant patterns with colors or more letters!

I had a lot of fun spending a week with Elmer and I think our kiddos did too! One of the books - Elmer and the Big Bird - presents a great anti-bullying message so I think I'm going to keep that one checked out from the library for another week and see if I have any student council members that would like to read it to some of our primary classes!