Elmer in the Snow by David McKee is a wonderful story about an elephant who teaches his friends about how to stay warm in the winter. When the story begins, Elmer finds his friends feeling grumpy about the cold weather. Elmer saves the day by taking them up into the mountains where it was much colder. There the elephants took part in all kinds of fun winter activities. When they all went back home, it magically seemed warmer.

This story has so many possibilities for writing, artwork, and science teaching and activities.

The children enjoyed drawing and writing about their favorite parts of the story and they did a wonderful, colorful mosaic picture that looked awesome on our bulletin board.

For the mosaic I gave each child a cutout on manila tag on the shape of an elephant. They then took pre-cut squares of colorful paper and glued them on. They had to make sure to glue the pieces close together so that none of the manila tag showed through. After they glued on all of their pieces, they turned the paper over and trimmed off the squares of colorful paper that were hanging over the edge of the manila elephant.

For the background, I had each child paint a piece of blue construction paper with a solution of salt and warm water. As it dried the children were excited to see the salt crystals appear. The children took white paper and tore pieces to glue onto their construction paper to create a snowy base and then used a large paint brush and white paint to add big falling snowflakes. Finally, the children glued their elephants onto the construction paper and I mounted them onto colorful background colors. It looked beautiful!

As a follow-up science activity, I had each child place their hands in regular cool tap water, tell me how the temperature felt (most of them said really cold) and then they put their hands into ice water, and then back into the cool tap water. They were surprised to report that the tap water seemed warmer after they had put their hands in the ice water.

One of the activities that Elmer and the other elephants do is building snow elephants. For fun we made white GAK (recipe below) which is a polymer that is between a liquid and a solid. We quickly built snowmen with the GAK and then watched them "melt". The children had a lot of fun with this activity and many tried it at home with their families.

 I read the story Just Enough Carrots to my class. It is about a little rabbit who goes shopping with his mom and compares the amount of food that they are buying with the other shoppers. It is a wonderful book for introducing the language less than, more than, and the same as.

I showed my class a plastic baggie filled with marshmallows, and a chart sectioned and labeled "less than" , "same as", and "more than". The children guessed how many they thought there were, as I recorded their names and numbers. Then we counted the marshmallows and glued each child's guess on the appropriate place on the chart.

I gave each child a baggie of marshmallows and they completed the sheet below.