E is for Elephant
We continued learning the letters that can be made using only straight lines. I have always loved the book Elmer. We looked at how to form the capital E correctly and practiced some paper tearing skills. It is so funny to find little basic skills like tearing paper that I have never thought to have the girls try until I realized it is an important fine motor skill. But this was the perfect project to practice that skill and make a little Elmer craft.
It was funny and interesting to watch the girls as I attempted to teach them to tear paper. October has a better general grasp of fine motor skills and so she caught on fairly well. But seeing London move from a little frustrated to confident during these couple of days was nice to see.
Neither of them had much stamina for tearing paper. I probably waited until too late for them to just enjoy the novelty of the act. Braxton tried but just didn’t have the ability to use both hands at once to tear the paper. I bet he will love this next year when he can really get a handle on the skill.
For a fun treat we made elephant biscuits. Each elephant requires two biscuits: one is kept whole as the head and the other is cut into three parts as seen below for the trunk and ears. I had the girls help elongate the trunk by rolling it like they do with play dough. And then each got to help place the raisins for the eyes.
While the biscuits baked, I had the girls use pool noodles as ‘trunks’ and push pom poms around the floor into squares that I had taped off. In hindsight, I would have purchased larger pom poms and taped off a larger section to make the task a little bit more manageable. But they had fun despite it being a little harder than I planned.
But look at that sheer excitement on London’s face as she cheered when she got one in the box. This activity lasted just about as long as it took for the biscuits to cooks.
The tiny humans obviously loved getting to eat bread (junk food) for absolutely no reason. I also love Braxton’s face as he makes his elephant sound.
I created little booklets for each of the letters as we cover them. They are extremely simple because I’m not trying to push a lot of worksheet type work. However, the girls love having a little booklet and it fits well into their Alphabet Notebooks. Each booklet is printed on one piece of paper. That paper is then folded and cut and like magic, it creates a tiny booklet.