This is how we celebrated Dr. Seuss’ birthday and Read across America day (combined). Be sure to read all the text to get more ideas!
Do you like them? Green scrambled eggs! They tasted great!
Breakfast reading, with a hard book and trying out the online reading feature of the library.
Casey got in on the action. 1fish2fish from Bumkins!
Isn’t she getting so big?!?
Counting out goldfish! Sorting by color!
Adding one fish, two fish, five fish!
Big sister helped her count her fish out!
We used the printables from Obseussed (talked about in THIS POST) to have a fish snack and do some sneaky math at the same time!
I also used the hop on pop (corn) printables from the same source, but used the blank ones and challenged my 5 year old daughter to read words such as: observe, celebrate, honor, cherish, believe. She did REALLY well with them. Obviously you could use any book and find words or make up your own like I did. You could also make shapes, colors, etc. Whatever your child is working on! I love the ‘blank’ resources and think you can really play around with them and use them for different things throughout the year!
During bath time, we decided to play a rhyming game, more to entertain ourselves than the kids. Obviously our 2 year old is too young for this, but she had fun saying random words, and we got a laugh out of it. Our 5 year old was really good at coming up with ‘hard to rhyme’ words. One of the best that I remember was Jesus. I think the winner for ‘best word’ was ‘sleazus’ –which is either one of the dwarfs that didn’t make a cut, or a really bad disciple that didn’t get named in the Bible. <—yes I’m a Christian but I don’t take myself too seriously, after all a lot of Jesus ministry was to people of ill repute, and calling them into the flock. [I bet he’d laugh about it too. Otherwise, why give me that sense of humor? ] You could modify this game for new writers by supplying them with an alphabet at the top of the page and ‘endings’ like AT OP OT IT UT UP … and have them write out every word they can think of that goes along with each ending sound, using the abc’s as a guide. This would also be a good game to play in a vehicle when the kids get kind of rowdy, because it makes them think and that just MIGHT decrease boredom!
We watched The Cat in the Hat on PBS and also watched Dora the Explorer and talked about Spanish words, too! Yes, TV CAN be educational!
The last thing we did was to use our cat in the hat matching game and work on teaching the 5 year old the rules and for the 2 year old it was learning how to turn over pieces and for both of course it was seeing if things matched. We didn’t worry too much about being strict with it, and only used about 18 or so cards to keep it simple.
I hope this gives you some ideas for not only this special ‘day’ but lots of other special days, too!
Did you do anything to celebrate Seuss?
We’re doing Suess week this week at work. I wanted a full week to celebrate because we do so many things. One of our activities will be to make a Seuss creature out of sculpey clay. I plan to bring the toaster oven and bake them right there and let the kids paint them. They’re either going to be a necklace or a refrigerator magnet, their choice.
We’re also using some fake fur and other embellishments to make a larger refrig magnet.
We do a Seuss read around, which is what it sounds like. I bring in ALL my books, somewhere around a ton, and they’re out on the table for kids to read.
I recite the Sneetches for them, and we also pass around a book for those who want to read out loud. Those who don’t want to read aren’t pressured, they just get to listen.
We’ll do a crayon resist, too. A large piece of watercolor paper, with a character drawn in crayon, then a wash of tempera over the top.
Fun times.
The kids can’t wait.