My children love to read Elmer, the patchwork elephant books by David McKee. The bright illustrations inspired us to make our own patch work elephants. A combination of painting, cutting and pasting skills makes this a great activity for preschool!
Time: 30 minutes (plus drying time for paint)
Age: Under 5's
Level: Easy
Materials
White paper pieces (I cut a letter/A4 paper in quarters)
Texture tools (feather, sponge, pom pom, eraser on pencil ect.)
Collect a variety of texture tools to create different patterns on pieces of paper. We collected a feather, rubber eraser on a pencil, pom pom, sponge paint brush, star textured roller and a paint brush.
Experiment with different patterns and paint colours on your sheets of paper. How does the pattern change if you spot versus drag the instrument?
Eraser on the end of a pencil.
Feather
Let your texture sheets dry.
Print out as many elephant outlines as you wish.
It is fine if the lines are not clean when you enlarge the image. They will be covered by the textures.
When your texture sheets are dry, cut into different shapes.
Paste the pattern sheets onto the elephant outlines to resemble Elmer.
Highlight the different patches by outlining in black pen and mount your elephants on black paper for display.
