Ingredients
- One piece of A4 paper per child. It can be the regular photocopying paper or a sheet of the drawing paper, of regular texture, from a drawing album that kids use at school.
- Markers or pencils, scissors and glue.
- My elephant was inspired by the design I found at Creative Family Fun website, which I adapted to the needs to my group.
Procedures
- Show the kids the finished product. I do not always do it but in case of this craft it seemed important to help the kids see the final product and to visualise how they are going to proceed during the entire activity.
- Check that everyone has all the materials by going through the list, picking the items up and showing them to the camera, asking ‘Have you got…?’
- Fold the A4 paper into halves, crosswise. Open the paper and draw the line in / along the fold. Cut into two.
- Put one of these halves aside. It will be used later for the trunk and the ears.
- Take the other piece of paper, hold it lengthways (with the longer edge on the top), draw a line along one of the shorter edges
- Closer to the top edge draw two eyes. It might be a good time to decide if the elephant is a boy or a girl and add eyelashes and / or a bow on the forehead.
- Open the glue and apply some glue along the line that has just been drawn along one of the shorter edges. Roll and glue into a tube. Put it on the side.
- Take the other piece of paper. Draw a circle. Cut it out. It is ok if it is not a perfect circle.
- Fold the circle into half and draw the line in / along the fold. Cut into two semi-circles.
- Draw the line along the diameter of the circle, on both semi-circles.
- Apply the glue on the line, on one of the semi-circle and attach it to the side of the head of the elephant. Press. It might be a good idea to show the kids how to press it here – with the fingers inside the tube and the fingers outside of it.
- Repeat with the other one.
- Prepare the strip of paper that will be used as the trunk. It will be glued under the eyes and it might be a good idea to check its length and perhaps cut off a bit.
- Roll one of the ends of the strip around a marker or a pencil. It will twist it a little bit and it will make it look a little bit more like a trunk. Apply the glue under the eyes of the elephant, attach the top of the trunk and press.
Why we like it
- This is a relatively easy craft that can be completed by children online, although I would not choose this particular activity as the first craft of the year. However, it is appropriate for five-year-old children, half-way through the academic year or the children who have taken part in some craft activities before.
- It is a simplified version of the original craft and it requires less preparation on the part of the teacher. It was ‘designed’ and tested with regular A4 photocopying or drawing paper, without any real templates or special resources such as the cardboard tubes and goggly eyes.
- If the students are younger, the teacher might choose to cut up the paper before the lesson (one big rectangle for the body, one small rectangle for the trunk and a circle for the ears).
- It is an online-friendly activity.
- The finished product can be easily used as a puppet (if it is put on the two or three fingers of a hand). One of my students also turned it into a bracelet, only because she chose to use a bigger square and, in the end, it was big enough to be worn on the wrist. As such, it can be used in simple role-plays.
- It definitely has the WOW element and kids get very excited to be able to make a real toy out of a piece of paper.
- It can be used to accompany a story, for example ‘Elmer’ or ‘Dear Zoo’ as one of the animals.
- Our elephants were very simple and white but they can be made colourful, very much in the theme of the elephant party we know from Elmer in which all the grey elephants ‘get dressed’ for the occasion. The teacher can use the colourful paper or the kids can decorate their squares before glueing them together into a tube. If there are some leftover stickers available, these can be used to decorate the elephants in the end.
- We used the elephant as a part of our unit Animals in Art and English classes and apart from making the elephant we also looked and talked about different elephants created by Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso and Henri Rousseau, among others.
- We also had a lot of fun playing with the semi-circles. We used them as our mouse’s ears, cat’s ears, sunglasses, monkey’s ears and wings. ‘I am a butterfly’ as a lot of fun!
Happy teaching!