Elephants and Jello

Our theme this week is The Zoo. Believe it or not, in all the years I've been teaching I've never done a zoo theme. I usually teach animals by habitat or class. But I like the zoo theme because I can teach about my favorite animals from all around the world! Today's animal was the elephant. I saw some melted crayon art on Pinterest, where they had a silhouette of an elephant and the melted crayon was water spraying from the elephant's trunk. I knew melting crayons would be hard to do in my classroom, so I decided to use blue kool-aid. I've always loved my previous kool-aid art projects, so I was looking forward to this one. But my grocery store was all out of blue kool-aid, so I picked up a box of blue jello instead. It worked just as well! I set the elephant silhouette (using this as my template) on the paper so the kids could get an idea of where to put the jello powder. They started by sprinkling a little bit by the trunk and then went up from there.

Then I took the elephant off before the kids sprayed their paper with water.

When the paper was dry, I glued on the elephants. So simple!

I invited another class to do this as well since I had so much jello. I love how they turned out!

I displayed some on my door:

They are a bit sticky, but not too bad.
And now for a bit of sad news. I mentioned in my last post that my boss sold our center. Well, the people who bought it are changing it to a different child care and I decided not to take a teaching position with them. I will be spending the summer with my daughter and perhaps another child from the neighborhood. I'll still be doing crafts, of course, but they will be for toddlers, not Pre-k. Although, I do have a bunch of projects from past years that I never got around to blogging about so I might sprinkle those in as well. I hope you still tune in to see what we do!

Fun Fact: When stretched out, an African elephant's ears are the shape of Africa.