A Herd of Patchwork Elephants

Elmer is a story about a patchwork elephant who lives with a herd of elephants.  This character likes to joke with the other elephants. One day he decided he didn't want to be different anymore.  He went into the forest and found a bush of elephant coloured berries.  He rolled in the berries to disguise himself to look lie the other elephants.  When he got back, the others were standing standing still and serious. Elmer though that was funny so he yelled, "BOOOO!".  The elephants thought he had joked so well they thought there should be an Elmer day every year so all the grey elephants could decorate themselves and Elmer would be elephant coloured.

We used oil pastels to make our own patchwork elephants.

P.S.  This blog entry was narrated by Janna!

Painting with tints and shades

We mixed white and black with blue paint to make various tints and shades.

Spiders

How do you respond when you see a spider?  Does it depend on its size or colour?  We have finished our short study of spiders.  We learned that they can live almost anywhere in the world!  Like all living things, they need certain things in order to stay alive.  Some spiders build orb webs, the circular ones that we commonly see and associate with Halloween but there are other kinds of webs too.  We also learned that spiders have an exoskeleton and two main body parts, a cephalothorax and an abdomen.  Did you know that all spiders have 8 legs but not always 8 eyes?  They also have spinnerets on their abdomens which help to guide the silk that they use to build their webs.  We had fun creating art to show what we know about spiders' bodies.  Here are the rest of our spiders: