🐘 What can an elephant's trunk do?

The elephant is the biggest animal on land, and it has one of the warmest hearts. Let's learn about elephant families.

📷 An African elephant with big ears and a long trunk.

What kind of animal is the elephant?

Elephants are the largest animals living on land. There are African elephants and Asian elephants, and African elephants have much bigger, wider ears. When an elephant flaps its huge ears like fans, the blood vessels in its ears cool down, which helps cool its hot body.

An elephant's trunk is its nose and upper lip joined together into one long shape, made of a huge number of muscles. With its trunk, an elephant smells, sucks up water to squirt into its mouth, sprays water or dust over its body, pulls up grass, and even picks up small objects. It's like a hand and a nose rolled into one super tool.

Elephants live in family herds. The herd is led by the oldest female, a grandmother elephant, who uses her long memory to guide her family to places with water and food. Elephants coat their bodies in mud to protect their skin from the hot sun and from insects.

🔍 Things to observe

• Watch a video to see the steps an elephant takes to drink water with its trunk.
• Compare the ear size of African and Asian elephants.
• Find where the baby is in a photo of an elephant family herd.

🖍️ Tips for drawing together with your child

• Draw a really big circle for the body, then add four legs like pillars.
• Draw a long, wavy trunk and big, wide ears to make an elephant.
• Draw it big enough to fill the whole canvas, and Granny Coco will beam.

💬 Let's talk about it

• If you had a long trunk like an elephant, what would you want to do with it?
• Why do you think the grandmother elephant leads the herd?

🏪 In the game: Granny Coco