Elmer the Patchwork Elephant Centers

We had such a fun second week of kindergarten! I am loving my kids and they seem to be enjoying all of the activities we have been doing together. This week, we read Elmer the Patchwork Elephant by David Mckee. I have about a 25 minute "inquiry" block in my day where we are able to do science and social studies activities. I am planning on using this time to implement Next Generation science standards. This week, we continued our "getting to know you" activities-- the theme was that we are all special! Elmer is one of my favorite books and it fits so well into this theme.

This week I had four centers that were "Elmer themed". Each group completed one center per day and by Friday everyone had done everything!

Sensory Paint Bags: I put some paint and shaving cream in a ziplock bag (the real kind-- the dollar tree kind may rip on you...) and duck taped the bag shut. The kids had a choice of using a Q-tip or their finger to practice letter formation. I made letter cards with a beginning sound picture for them to pull out of a container.  You can grab the letter cards for free HERE. 

Hidden Words Activity: I do the Daily Five during my literacy block. It has been my goal to sneak in word work activities during our beginning of the year inquiry centers. That way, the kids are already introduced to them when we start guided reading/ the Daily Five. For this activity, the kids wrote their names and word wall words in white crayon. Then, they colored over it in marker. You can grab this activity and a few others for free HERE. 

Painting Elmer: We learned how to use water color paint at this center. I printed out Elmer on cardstock and the kids got to make their very own patchwork elephants. I had them write a sentence about why they are special using the sentence frame "I can___." Grab this for free HERE. 

Color Mixing & Traveling Rainbow: This was the "teacher station" because I didn't want my small friends handling the food coloring solo. Before we made the rainbow, we did some color mixing. I let each child in the group choose which two colors to mix together. After, we made our rainbow! We simply put paper towels and linked them to the next cup to make the rainbow travel.