This is the beginning of a new series of blog posts on fun, unique animals which many students are sure to love—we’ll be writing easy-to-read, quick, and informative posts on animals from dolphins and lions, to panda bears, tigers, and penguins.

Each new post will go over a different, fun, unique animal, and explore the interesting traits and characteristics of the specific animal with 10 fun facts. The purpose of this series of posts is to help teachers share information on some of the world’s most interesting animals, and to get students in kindergarten and first grade excited about reading, exploring, and understanding more about these animals in class and at home.

This week, we will be going over and discussing one of the largest animals in the wild — the elephant. There are several remarkable, fun facts about the elephant that are sure to fascinate young students. Following are just 10 facts that are sure to get your students excited to learn more and read more about elephants. You can use this information in units or lessons on elephants, or fun classroom activities around elephants.

• Elephants are the largest mammals, and largest land animals, in the world. Some elephants weigh as much as 14,000 pounds, and are as tall as 13 feet.

      Fun  Fact 2

• Elephants are able live to be over seventy years old when living in the wild.

      Fun  Fact 3

• Elephants have a very highly developed brain; their brain is larger than the brains of all other land mammals.

      Fun  Fact 4

• Elephants are very social animals and have a well-developed system of communication.

      Fun  Fact 5

• Elephants like to eat plants, and they like to live next to bodies of water.

        Fun Fact 6

• Elephants are like humans—they are either right-tusked, or left-tusked, like humans are either right-handed or left-handed.

      Fun  Fact 7

• Elephants one of only a few mammals which are unable to jump.

      Fun  Fact 8

• Elephants lack great vision, and have an average sense of sight. Elephants do, however, possess both a very good sense of smell and sense of hearing, as well as a great sense of touch.

      Fun  Fact 9

• Believe it or not, elephants are able to swim—they use their trunk to breathe, similar to a snorkel, when submerged in deep water.

      Fun  Fact 10

• Elephants are able to have an improved sense of smell by waving their trunks up in the air.

This is the end of the first post in this series of blog posts on  fun facts about animals for kids in kindergarten and first grade. To read the next post in this series, please check back next week. As always, you can subscribe to our blog to get new posts in your inbox.

To view and learn more about titles from Hameray on the topic of elephants, please click the images below.

 

To download an information sheet with key features about the Zoozoo Into the Wild series, which contains the books about elephants mentioned, please click the image below.