What do elephants eat? Leaves! Learning about elephants is so fun when it’s real – like eating leaves like elephants! For lunch, we used the Mother Goose Time recipe card activity and made an Elephant Leaf Salad Wrap.
I made small changes to the recipe because I thought it might make it easier for my group. That’s what’s great about Mother Goose Time lessons – it’s easy to customize and do it your way. Everyone will have a slightly different experience but it needs to work for your group and it’s very workable so use your expertise and ideas too!
E is for Elephant Leaf Salad Wrap
Instead of slicing the vegetables, I grated the carrots and cucumbers. The kids didn’t get to do this part so they lost a little hands on work but they watched me and we talked about what I was doing, what parts of the grater are sharp and what we were going to make. Salad wraps maybe don’t mean so much to a child but elephant leaf salad – that’s exciting! I had a head of romaine lettuce so I used that which is fun in itself because the leaves are huge! I explained that the “white parts” are kind of hard and might be bitter so they didn’t have to eat that part but they could use it hold onto their wrap.
Shredded carrots:
Peeled/shredded cucumber (I used seedless):
We took turns spooning carrot and cucumber onto lettuce leaves. Then I offered ranch dressing which made it even better! I won’t pretend – this was a bit messy but they also completely enjoyed their elephant leaf salad wraps! 5/5 2-5-year-olds ate their wraps and 4/5 of them asked for another one. Three in the group had 3 or 4! They ate their veggies very well that day! E is for Elephant – leaf salad wraps!
Later in the day, a kiddo made me an “olive salad”. Love it!
Our craft was a paper plate elephant puppet. They were a little bit of cutting and gluing so I pre-assembled them. I prefer they do their own work but it’s summer time and we’re spending more of our time outdoors.
I had them mix paint to make gray in a cup before painting. We talked about how to make gray and decided to start with white paint and add black. They stirred and requested additional black paint until it was as dark as they wanted. We added a little bit of sparkle paint in there too because it’s fun. No other reason than that!
See how cute they turned out? They have personality!
The Mother Goose Time Teacher’s Guide has a section in the back with all the music lyrics for the songs on the coordinating CD.
Using the puppets the kids pretended to be elephants and marched to the E is for Elephant song.
It was another successful day learning with Mother Goose Time! This is what’s up for week two:
What until you see what we did for letter F is for Fox!