Colour and Pattern with Elmer
A parade of patchwork elephants stomped into the Bears classroom to make it bright, colourful and elephant themed.
On the creative table, we covered a milk bottle with tissue paper in a patchwork effect to create Elmer. We were encouraged to think about our patchwork design and make sure that no colours the same were next to each other. Once our Elmers were dry, we added googly eyes, patchwork ears and a wool tassel tail.
We shared lots of different Elmer stories and on small world we set an Elmer scene for the children to create different adventures for Elmer, the other elephants and the jungle animals.
In the story Elmer's Special Day, it is time for the annual Elmer's day celebrations. All the elephants noisily paint themselves with wild colourful patterns in preparation for the parade. The Bears created their own colourful patterned elephants with coloured pen control Elmers, sticker Elmers and bead collage playdough Elmers. We wrote sentences to describe our patterned Elmers, using our colour and pattern word banks to help us.
On our green practical table, we baked and decorated elephant shaped biscuits. We created playdough elephants using shaped cutters and made elephant skin textures with playdough tools. To develop and strengthen our fine motor control, we used tweezers to place coloured cubes onto Elmer mats.
On the creative table, we needed patience and control to paint the squares on a large Elmer. We were encouraged to hold the paintbrushes correctly, paint within the lines and think about the colours we painted. We painted the first side with adult support and encouragement and the second side we painted independently. Our final job was to stuff Elmer by screwing up newspapers and joining him together using staples to join the painted squared paper to make our 3D puffy Elmer.
In the Elmer's Walk story, Elmer takes his time to appreciate the world around him. So the Bears took a walk around school in their colour teams to look for things that match each of Elmer's colours.
In our construction area, we created coloured patterns with linking elephants, worked together to build a large floor Elmer with coloured squares, built Elmer floor puzzles and created tricky 3D Multilink Elmers.
Next, underwear stealing aliens visit the Bears.