E is for Elephant

Elephants are very smart, interesting, and humongous creatures. They have amazing trunks that they use to communicate with, but they also use their feet to communicate with through stomping and vibrations. Did you know that they are very sociable, loving creatures that bury their dead and have been seen to shed tears when separated from each other? So amazing. 

  We didn't even make it to the library for this unit, but I had an e-book about elephants, and a Zoo-book magazine Tobes has always loved from his great-grandparents. We are learning with this unit "I will remember what God has done for me." I had no idea that the reason we say that an elephant never forgets, is because it really is a very smart animal that never forgets its way around the jungle.

      We played a memory game, where I displayed 10 items for the boys to try and remember. We named off each item in a row, and then the boys turned around while I hid two of the items. Then, they turned around and tried to remember the missing items. They loved this game!

    I would make a horrible elephant, as I just forgot that I was browning hamburger meat. Oops....

Anyways, He thought this picture in his magazine of all the food an elephant eats in a year deserving of a school project... so we made a graph. No big surprise, elephants eat a lot.

Here he is writing "I will remember what God has done for me." We discussed the importance of remembering the blessings God has given us, and that we should give thanks and tell all people about the wonderful things He has done.

                                   

We read one of my favorite books from my childhood...

and then I amazed my kids with my tracing abilities,

 and we remade our favorite before and after scenes from the book:

We made elephant toothpaste:

 which became an elephant bath:

Finally, we listened to our weekly classical music: Bach: Brandenburg Concerto no.4 in G Minor

and fingerpainted with pudding on a cookie sheet. 

Tobes (who had to make sure a bath was ready for him in order to get messy) 

loved moving the slime to the music.

Jones hardly made any art since he found the paint so tasty.

I had hoped to visit the Knoxville Zoo (since it has elephants), but it didn't happen. Weather wasn't good. Thankfully, we found lots of fun activities to do instead. There is A LOT of elephant ideas on pinterest and in the My Father's World Curriculum. We actually didn't even have time to do everything. Especially since the boys REALLY wanted to learn about foxes! So... instead of k for kangaroo (unit 17), we are moving on to x for fox (unit 23).