Ee elephant day- preschool style

Ee elephant day was a no-brainer for me book wise.  I love But No Elephants by Jerry Smath.This was such a fun book to work with because this was my book from when I was little.  I have read it hundreds of times.  I used to keep it and a few others from my childhood on my shelf and I read them to my elementary classes.  Even my 6th graders secretly enjoyed a kiddy picture book now and then.

I made up a class set of story sticks to go with the book.  After we read the story, we retold it with the pieces.   I couldn't find any appropriate clipart online, so I just drew out the animals and made lots of copies, colored and cut lots of pictures and laminated and recut them all.  Each has velcro on the back.  It was one of those projects that seems like a good idea at the time and then 3 hours in you're thinking... really?  All this for a 10 minute activity? 

Then, I had prepared a baby elephant who likes little lower case e peanuts and a big mama elephant who liked big uppercase E peanuts.  I spread out the peanuts and the kids chose either an E or e and fed it to the appropriate elephant.  The girls all chose the baby elephants and lower case e's and the boys all chose the newly named 'daddy' elephant and the upper case Es.  Then, I let them choose a peanut with a non Ee letter and say the name of the letter and place it in the house (since Grandma Tildy did not want elephants, she wouldn't have wanted the Ee peanuts).  I laminated all the peanuts, but the poor elephants were left naked and not safely protected in lamination.  My school does not have a laminator and my personal laminator is limited in the size of projects it handles.

These elephant cards were funny to look at.  They are from training happy hearts.  She lists several possible games for them, but I just showed them and we tried to guess what the word on the card was based on the picture and the sound of the first letter. 

This was the craft for the day.  Here's how it's made.  I tried to draw up an illustration in my 'paint program', but a description is best.  trust me.  A sheet of construction paper is folded in half hamburger style.  The fold here is the fold in the paper.  While folded, cut along a drawn line about 1 1/2 inch from a side edge.  Cut that piece in half on the fold.  One piece becomes the trunk, the other can be a tail or is trash.  On the large remaining piece, draw and then cut an arch in the center at the bottom.  Each side becomes a leg and the half circles cut out become the ears.  Decorate as desired; toes, face, etc.

At the end of the day, we worked on these letter puzzles.  You follow the E or e letters through the maze of letters to the end.   They are available at Tons of Preschool Activities. 

We used dot markers to follow the path. 

My Lou had done most of the letters, he loves them.

Other than the Ff family flamingo things still in my school bag, that catches me up with my preschool postings.  whooo.  

My sister was visiting recently and we checked a bunch of her school books AR levels.  Now she has me working motivated to recheck and label all my books  (AR has really increased their selection in the past few years that I've been out of elementary school!).  That's tonight's continued project.  Good thing day-light savings gets me an extra hour tonight, hubby is starting to notice the dozens of piles of sorted books all over the floor.