"E" week time!

"E" week is up and it's mostly Elephants and Eggs because those are short E sounds, but my oldest helped draw Elsa too and gave me a few more ideas for the chalk board. 

I started with the Elephant and the 'e' egg and just kept adding stuff till I thought of "Encyclopedia" and how I could make it all look like they were coming out of the Encyclopedia.  Pretty happy with how it turned out!  The chalk boards take a few hours each to do, but I think the girls really like them and they are quite memorable.  Perhaps I'll print out the pictures and make a book with them. :)

Before I made my elephant my 6 year old did her own chalk drawing of one!  I think it's adorable.

The pictures are out of order, but this is the final product of this fabulous puzzle globe.  You can find it here.

Pointing to about where we live in TX.

Also, I have to say, when we were reading a missionary story I was happy to see my oldest get excited about asking where the story took place and asked if I could show her on the globe.  :)

Oh, and I should share that book too! 

"Ian and the gigantic leafy obstacle" is a missionary story (my girls were super impressed at hearing that it was a TRUE story) and is about how God uses an elephant to answer a prayer, but there's a bit more to it than that.  It's really quite well told though I had to clarify a few things as the wording was a bit grown up in places.

Half way through at this point they wanted to put something inside of it and Lily picked a picture of her favorite Uncle who's more like an older cousin or big brother to her and then we wrote a note of all the things we are thankful for and put it in.

The puzzle starts in Antarctica and only has 180 pieces... if your kids are older and you like this idea you can find some that have over 500 pieces!

I don't know how the other puzzles compare but this one was super sturdy plastic and was numbered with arrows so we could easily put it together on the wrong side and then keep flipping it over to see what we were making.

One of our library books for "E" week was this one by Dr Seuss.  And to go along with the idea of funny scrambled eggs we put fun stuff in ours too!  Green sprinkles, chocolate shavings, and vanilla extract were the first attempt.  It actually wasn't bad.. sort of like french toast because it was sweeter eggs.  They looked funny of course!

We kicked off "E" week with a visit to the zoo and a "keeper encounter" with lots of fun info about the Elephants. 

Some interesting facts about Elephants--  Adult male elephants live on their own and females live in a group with young ones.  One elephant can poop up to 80 lbs in a single day (support your zoo workers because they have to clean that up!)  Elephants trumpet of course, but they also communicate with sounds too low for humans to hear and they also can feel vibrations in the ground.

Another book to recommend is this one.  I got it used on amazon last year and it is the story of a young elephant that has a super memory (even better than most elephants) and he thinks of the good things that he's learned which is great (has a few facts about elephants in the story) but one day when he's playing with his big brother and sister his brother pushes him down in the water and mud and was too rough on him during play time.  The little elephant says that his brother is bad and decides that he won't forget what his brother did because he's the elephant with the super memory.  He grows thin and sad and one day the grandmother elephant that is in charge asks him what is going on and when he tells her she says, "you have forgotten what is most important, and you and he are brothers." (That's not an exact quote, but it's close.)  I feel like I'm always having to deal with fights of some kind, but it IS getting better and stories like this do help.

Sitting on a little statue.  So cute.

Another fun project was using this cookie cutter (That I got during "B" week I think) to cut out some brownies (I have a fabulous gf recipe for them!) and decorate the elephants!

 I got the idea for this sort of decorating when I read this book to the girls "Elmer's Special Day" Where in Elmer (the colorful one) paints himself like a normal elephant color and all the other animals paint themselves all different ways and have a parade.  Even animals that aren't elephants joined in, but they just wore elephant masks.  Anyway, it was a cute story and a great way to have some fun with our elephants.

This was the Daddy's decorated elephant.  He said afterward how he'd put a bit too much frosting on it.

This was Grammy's elephant.  It was really fun that she got to do this with us too!  We had dessert right before dinner.

The three year old decided to paint hers all blue.  Look at that crazy grin.

The middle one working the colors while the Daddy stuffs his face.  ;)

My oldest made a whole scene with frosting on her plate and colored her elephant as close to how Elmer himself looked as possible.  Totally like her to strive for excellence like that!

This one was mine... less frosting because the brownies didn't need it!

After reading some books about elephant facts and after watching a Wild Kratts about Elephants my oldest set to work making a beeswax model of an elephant.  The only thing I helped her with was the eye position as they just needed to be a bit more on the sides of the elephants head to be realistic.

The realistic elephant meets the "melephant"-- she'd created that one a while back after watching "Cloudy with a chance of meatballs 2"  It's a watermelon/elephant in case you wondered.  ;)

And winding down "E" week we decided to do another trip to the zoo.  No one was taking pictures here so we jumped in for a shot.

The girls wanted me to take a picture of them in the egg for "E" week too.

And they got to ride the carousel 3 times before we left!  I asked them to ride the elephant and dinosaur so I could take this picture.  They were super sweet how they held hands.  I'm so glad they are such good friends.  :)

I still have one more day that we'll being working on "E" things.  Just finishing up some library books and I'll have them do some copy work from the chalk board into their books.