The Dimensions of an Elephant Are Most Impressive

     

So excited!!! Every year I teach a novel by the incredibly talented Kate DiCamillo. She has written many wonderful books for children, among them Because of Winn-Dixie, The Tale of Despereaux, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, and The Magician's Elephant. I confess that when reading certain chapters of Edward Tulane I have been known to pass the book off to one of my students to read aloud as I am crying too hard to continue. This has also been known to occur during my readings of Charlotte's Web...

This year we have been reading and jumping off from The Magician's Elephant. I must plug this book as being an amazing read all the way through middle school - it is heavy with opportunities for discussion and creativity - and as an adult, I find it to be enchanting.

So. There is a an odd character who appears in the novel for one chapter only, wearing a dark suit and a top hat. He continuously mutters, "The dimensions of an elephant are most impressive. The dimensions of an elephant are most impressive, indeed." Well, for some reason my students just loved that character. They would raise their hands and say his line, or march around the playground shouting it out to each other. I started to think about the dimensions of an elephant - what could we do with that line? Writing prompt? Bulletin board? Hmmm.

We started out with the obvious; researching the Asian elephant (since that's what's in the book), Venn Diagraming with the African elephant. Then, the book started to discuss the difficulties of housing an elephant. It occurred to me that we could see what it was like to have an actual size elephant in our classroom. Now, like most of my brainstorms, this one occurred just before a crazy time at school, two days before Open House. Why not create, in two days time, a life size elephant and suspend it somehow from the ceiling of my classroom? Surely, one adult and 20 seven and eight year olds can accomplish that.

Here's how it went down: we created our elephant from recycled materials, and she is a life size silhouette of a female Asian elephant. Since the kids were intrigued by the top-hatted man in line to see the elephant who repeatedly muttered, "The dimensions of an elephant are most impressive." those words appear in giant writing along the top curves of our elephant. The rest of the collage was made by the kids gluing on the "skin" pieces by taking off their shoes and stomping all the pieces down. You can imagine the chaos that ensued during this stage! Featured in the collage are my 2nd Graders' haiku and 3rd Graders diamontes about the elephant's feelings, as well as their illustrations of their favorite parts/characters from the story.

She is now hanging in our classroom - quite an engineering feat that required my husband and three teenagers! She was in place and I had my clothes changed and the floor vacuumed with fifteen minutes to spare before Open House.

 
When the sun shines in the windows behind her she becomes a stained glass window. Most impressive, indeed! We are feeling a bit smug at our originality, teamwork and final product. But here is the even more fun addendum - Kate DiCamillo had a book signing here a couple of weeks ago. I could not attend (my son's 18th birthday took precedence) but was able to arrange preferred seating for my class (thank you Amea's mom!)and some of my moms' volunteered to be in charge of the outing. I sent along a photo collage of our project and today I received an email from the publishing house saying how impressed the author was and that they want to post our work! My class will be thrilled!