E...Elephant

We are s.l.o.w.l.y. making our way through My Father's World this summer.  Hey...it's summer, right?

Well, over the past week or so, we have been learning around Elephants.  They key phrase is "I will remember what God has done for me".  However, to be honest, I have not made the girls memorize that or really much of anything lately.  We are gearing up though for a tough semester with lots of memorization...so, we need to start exercising our brains again. 

Anyway....we did have fun reading about elephants and doing some really fun activities.
Some of our favorite books were
Grandma Elephant's in Charge by Martin Jenkins
An Elephant Grows up by Anastasia Suen
and Elephants Can Paint Too! by Katya Arnold.

The last one was really interesting and created a morning of fun for us.  Elephants Can Paint Too! showed us about some Asian Elephants that are being taught to paint. Some just paint lines and dots...but some can even be taught to paint flowers!  So...inspired by the book...we decided to paint like elephants.  Although, instead of holding the brush with our trunk, we used our mouth (because we don't have a trunk, and there is no way our nose would work ;)



Can you hear Nicole giggling here?



They even dipped their paint brushes in the paint while holding it in their mouth. The girls really enjoyed this...they giggled almost the whole time.

 The last page of the book shows two elephants...one with his rear facing you with several paint streaks on his behind. the other with a paint brush in his hand.  It looks like they were being ornory and painting each other.  Well, that sort of happened to us.  Both girls were bent over to get more paint on their brush.  Nicole stood up, and painted Hannah's forehead as she stood.  Hannah was not happy, but Nicole and I giggled. 



My little elephant's masterpiece



My other little elephant's masterpiece.

We also made an elephant out of our hand prints.  I picked up Hand-Print Animal Art by Carolyn Carreiro at a garage sale a while ago.  In the back, it gave instructions on using our hands to paint an elephant.  Here are their works of art.

Nicole's hand print elephant with no help from me...just instructions

Hannah's hand print elephant...I had to help her a lot on this one.

We also made elephants masks from the template found here.



Hannah's elephant mask...she glued this herself.



Nicole's elephant mask..she cut and glued herself:)

We learned about the difference between African and Asian elephants from this website which also included other activities, poems and puzzles.  We even had to put together these two types of elephants and then label the correct one.

My Other Other little elephant.  He saw me taking pictures and said "Ma-Ma, Cheese" So, I snapped a picture of him. 

We used this as a time to have fun with a purpose.  The girls know the difference between African and Asian Elephants.  They insisted I call them "little elephant" while painting with their mouths and we practiced making noises like elephants.