Elmer the Elephant

In my kindergarten-first grade art class I have decided to incorporate literacy. Anywhere I can push books and reading I do. Every class I start out by reading a book and coordinate an art project to go along with it. This week I read the book Elmer by David McKee. The book is about an elephant that is multi-colored instead of grey like the rest of the heard. Elmer always is made fun of because of the way he looks. One day he decided to cover himself in mud to look like everyone else. When he blends in, the other elephants start to miss him. He didn't know how much people appreciated him. Then the rain comes and washes the mud away. All the elephants are so excited that Elmer is back, that they cover themselves will all different paint colors to look more like Elmer. This book celebrates diversity and being and individual. After we read and discussed the book, each student was given a cut out of an elephant. I provided each table with a variety of tissue paper squares. They layered tissue paper on their elephants to make their own design. Tissue paper and glue is much more difficult for little kindergarteners to work with than I had planned. Talk about a mess in the classroom. While the elephants were drying, each kid decorated a setting for their elephant. Some created a zoo while others chose to draw a jungle. When everything was complete they glued their elephants into the setting. We had an extra 10 minutes in class so I put on a movie about baby elephants. The kids went nuts! They loved how it all related to the book we started with.

Other book/craft projects we have done that I didn't document with photos include:

-Little Cloud by Eric Carle. We created shapes out of cotton balls and gluing them onto blue paper.

-I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Leaf by Alison Jackson We painted leaves. I cut out leaf shapes from coffee filters. The kids used watercolors and saw how the colors blended. Once the leaves were dry we hung them up on the wall for decoration.

-Ten Apples Up on Top by Dr. Seuss. We wrote our own story. Each kid was given a page that said ___(name)______ has _____ apples up on top. They drew themselves and decided how many apples they had on their head.

-I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Rose by Alison Jackson. We made our own valentine's for classmates.

-All You Need for a Snowman by Alice Schertle. We made our own snowmen out of marshmallows. I used the tiny marshmallows for the craft. Each kiddos drew three circles with glue and placed the marshmallows on the glue. They then decorated the snowmen. As a treat I brought in large marshmallows to snack on after.

-My Mouth is a Volcano by Julia Cook. In class we have a lot of kids who like to blurt out answers and stories. This is a great book to bring up the conversation about why blurting out isn't always okay. We then created three volcanoes for our class. I had already glued a 2 liter bottle of diet soda onto paper plates and made a triangle out of construction paper. The kids then put different pieces of construction paper squares on the volcanoes. They decided what colors to use and how big the volcano was. Then we took all three volcanoes outside and blew them up. **Make sure you do this part outside. Drop a whole pack of mentos into a 2 liter bottle of diet soda and watch the volcano erupt. The little ones were so excited.

I have many more art project/book ideas that I have tried in my classroom. If you need anymore, let me know or share some of your own.