Stamping with Kindergarten

I love the Elmer books for so many reasons. If you're looking for a non-halloween themed book they do mention dressing up and parades, but in a non-halloween manner in both "Elmer" and "Elmer Again." I recently purchased the latter as an iBook so that I always have it with me on my laptop. And it has audio, so I don't have to read aloud all day and kill my throat.

I decided to use this as an intro to printmaking. We actually did it in reverse, meaning they did the stamping and printmaking lesson first. During our second session we read the book and cut Elmers out of our already stamped paper. You could also do grids on the elephants or Mondrian Elephants.

Even though one of my kindergarten classes had a fire drill in the middle of our painting day I'm still a huge fan of this lesson. And that's saying a lot. I think it looks much harder than it is, and the students were delighted with the result. Doing the book second was new for me, and it was a nice change of pace from "read the story and make something from the book."

My teacher sample, patterns and two week lesson plan are all bundled up over on TpT.

Speaking of patterns....am I the only one who varies my patterns slightly so they don't all look the same in the hallway? I made some trunks up and some down and I intentionally place them on the table with some facing left and some facing right.