Violent free surface flows with strong fluid-solid interactions can produce a tremendous pressure load on structures, resu-lting in elastic and even plastic deformations. Modeling hydro-elastic problems with structure deformations and a free surface break-up is difficult by using routine numerical methods. This paper presents an improved Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method for modeling hydro-elastic problems. The fluid particles are used to model the free surface flows governed by Navier-Stokes equations, and the solid particles are used to model the dynamic movement and deformation of the elastic solid objects. The impro-ved SPH method employs a Kernel Gradient Correction (KGC) technique to improve the computational accuracy and a Fluid-Solid Interface Treatment (FSIT) algorithm with the interface fluid and solid particles being treated as the virtual particles against their counterparts and a soft repulsive force to prevent the penetration and a corrective density approximation scheme to remove the nume-rical oscillations. Three typical numerical examples are simulated, including a head-on collision of two rubber rings, the dam break with an elastic gate and the water impact onto a forefront elastic plate. The obtained SPH results agree well with experimental obse-rvations and numerical results from other sources.