E is for Elephantlife magazine photographs

E is for Elephant

This week we learned about the letter E for Elephant. We did fun worksheets & activities to practice letters, colors, counting, logic, and more from Confessions of a Homeschooler’s Letter of the Week (click to grab your own free set of E Printables).

We also made a letter E Alphabet craft. We are making one of these for every letter in the alphabet this year out of foam sheets. It is such a fun way to interact with letters in a playful, memorable way. then we put the letters on our Chicka Chicka Boom Boom Tree =-)

Unfortunately, our closest zoo is revamping it’s Elephant exhibit so we can’t go see any right now. But, we did take a look at pictures from when we did see Elephants to help the kids remember. The first two are from elephants we saw at the Ringling Brothers Circus – elephant making art & elephants in the show.

And here is a blast from the past – Goofy (15 months) on an elephant at a zoo carousel.

We talked about where Elephants live - in Africa & Asia and found it on our map. Then we read some nonfiction books to learn about elephants. We also read some wonderful fiction stories about elephants:

Minnie had fun looking through these cute Elephant action cards we found here. She also liked to use them to tell me stories – great narrative story telling practice!!

We made a 3D Elephant out of a foam sheet. Our patchwork elephant looks just like Elmer, don’t you think? (Note: The {free} elephant template is in the Elephant Add-On Pack below.)

We had an elephant inspired lunch. I made PB & J and cut out with an elephant cookie cutter. I used food safe markers to add eyes & a mouth (the kids thought that was HILARIOUS!) I made a cheese & broccoli tree and a mandarin orange sun. Lunch was a hit =-)

Made an Elephant from a box – We made an elephant from a box we had laying around in preparation for our feed the elephant game.

The kids learned that black & white make gray! We cut off one side of the box and made two ears out of it. Then we taped the top shut. Next we painted the 3 sides of the box and two ears gray. Finally, after it dried about 3 hours, we made a 3” x 1.5” hole for the mouth and attached construction paper eyes & rolled up trunk.

Feed the Elephant - For this game we made an elephant (see above for directions). I printed out the peanuts (see free Elephant Add-ON Pack below) on cardstock. Now we were ready to play! We played several different way: feed the correct upper/lower case E, feed the correct alphabet letter, feed the correct number, and more. Big brother also got to join in on the fun with the addition peanuts. I also included blank peanuts that I laminated and wrote Goofy’s (1st grade) sight words & spelling words on. It was great learning fun!