Rainy Day Play with the Elephant’s Umbrella

Tuesday seems to have become our ‘at home’ day, a day when we don’t do a great deal other than just ‘be’. This week we managed to do an awful lot including taking a look at the beautiful Elephant’s Umbrella book from Tiny Owl Publishing.

It’s a gloriously illustrated book, rich in colours and detail and tells the story of Elephant who loves to share his umbrella. However, it is one day blown away by the wind and is found by other jungle animals. The story is simple, but effective, and underlines the importance of kindness and sharing.

Anything with animals in is sure to appeal to my three and I thought it would be a good book to extend with a simple activity. I set the children up to make some simple paper umbrellas. They made these using cake cases folded in half. They set about decorating them using pens whilst I set up the tuff spot.

I put the tuff spot and stand up and drew a simple umbrella using chalk. I then found some plastic toys to represent the elephant, the leopard and the bear. When the children had finished decorating their umbrellas we set them up and re-enacted the story.

The children blew their umbrellas from the elephant, to the bear, to the leopard and back to the elepahant again. They had lots of fun doing this and there is a short video over on Instagram here of Miss E playing with this.

We really enjoyed the story of The Elephant’s Umbrella and it is so wonderfully illustrated. It’s the perfect book for home and school, to inspire conversations about sharing and caring for others as well as helping to inspire young artists with the bold and beautiful illustrations.