Elmer the Elephant  By David McKee

I was very excited to received 8 paperback books all about

Elmer the Elephant from "Books Are Fun".  I decided to

create my own elephant unit focused all around Elmer the Elephant.

Elmer is a very unique patchwork elephant that is always joking and

tricking his friends.  One day he is tired of always being different and decides to trick his friends by turning himself gray like all the other elephants.  Elmer scares his friends and they say "Too bad Elmer isn't here to see this"  As the rain falls, Elmer turns back Elmer color.  So in honor of this special day, the other elephants decorate themselves colorful like Elmer and Elmer decorates himself elephant color and they have an Elmer day parade.

The 2nd grade students talked about being unique, the other way to spell it "You"nique, and how it is important to be yourself.  Then all students were able to create their own uniquely decorated elephant for our Elmer Day Parade.

We read many other books by David McKee, Elmer Again, Elmer in the Snow, and Elmer and Grandpa Eldo.  We learned about characters (Rose, Wilber, Grandpa Eldo) and talked about the different settings of the stories.

My favorite activity of our Elmer unit was reading the Pop up book titled:

It had wonderful pop-ups throughout the story.  So a perfect culmination project was for each student to create their own pop-up with 2 characters and a setting.  I had the basic cuts for the pop-up ready to go. It took 2 class periods to complete this project (1 hr total).  The first day we read the "Elmer Pop-Up Book" and colored our 2 elephants and the 2nd class period we finished decorating the scenes and added our our creative unique touches.  Many students had an owl popping out of the tree or a snake popping out of the grass.  All 120 pop-ups were amazing. Here is a look at our process and our finished products.

What a wonderful time the students had with this project.  We invited the office staff in to share in our celebration.  We read them our "Elmer poem" and took a tour of our pop-up projects.

Here is the Elmer poem Gloria and I wrote for the students;

Elmer the Elephant is funny
Elmer the Elephant is cool
Elmer the Elephant is silly
We can read about Elmer at school.

Elmer the Elephant is colorful
Elmer the Elephant is bold
Elmer the Elephant can do anything
Reading about Elmer never gets old