Kindergarten Warm/Cool Elmer the Elephant

This is a new project that I did this year with my kindergarteners. I read Elmer by David McKee.
If you haven't read this book, it's a great book to read to your students to talk about being different. After we read the book, I showed them how to use basic shapes to draw their own Elmer. It was like we were doing a magic trick- the ooh's and aah's made my day! Their Elmer's turned out adorable. Then I showed them how to use a tool that the big kids use- a ruler! They used the ruler to draw straight lines on Elmer going side to side and up and down. I made sure to show them how to hold the ruler so that it wouldn't slide on them.

After they had drawn Elmer, we worked on adding some details to our picture to create a landscape: we added the ground, so that Elmer wasn't flying in the air, a tree to show that he was in the jungle, some clouds, the sun, birds, etc.

They traced their entire picture with a black marker.

They used crayons to color the entire background. We really had to talk about how the sky touches the ground. It doesn't stop up at the top of the paper.

When they were finished coloring their background, we learned about warm and cool colors. They got to choose whether they wanted Elmer to be warm or cool, but they could not use both (very difficult for a 5 year old!). They got to use oil pastels to color him in and they had to work really hard to color Elmer in so that it was dark- I kept telling them to press HARD! Pin It