Dr. Seuss Week!

WOW!  I do believe this was the greatest week EVER at school.  Okay, maybe not THE greatest, but I bet it was in the top 10!  Over the past several weeks the weather in central Alabama has been crazy.  Like most of the country, we have had a lot of snow AND ice.  Unlike most of the country, the people of central Alabama cannot function very well in snow and ice, so we have missed a lot of school.  But, this past week we were actually in school for 5 consecutive days, so we had fun talking about the wonderful Dr. Seuss! 

We started our unit by reading one of my all time favorite books, My Many Colored Days.  Of course everyone has to tell me their favorite color so after we read our book, we made our very own "colored day" project.

 

I'm not sure if you can tell by the pictures, but the background has different shades of colors.  We also used a lot of our "fun" paint brushes (i.e. scrubbers, rollers, craft sticks, scrappers, etc.).  This project is fun because the children always talk about their "favorite" color while painting.

 

Tuesday is a day reserved for our BIG projects.  We started our day by reading 10 Apples Up On Top.  Some of Dr. Seuss' books are long but my class didn't mind.  We all would squeal with excitement when we recognized words that rhyme.  Our art project for the day was very special.  First, we wrote the numbers one through ten on little apples cut from our wonderful Ellison machine.  Then we glued down a picture of ourselves and put those little apples right on top of our heads!

 

 

The end results were so fun and BIG!

 



Everyone loved carrying them home because they were "the biggest picture ever" (yes, that is a quote from precious little "S"!).

 

The next book we read was Horton Hears a Who.  I was really worried about the length of this book, but once again my class surprised me.  Everyone giggled when I changed voices with each character and again, they squealed when they heard words that rhymed.  Our project for the day was simple but fun.  We always have a fun day when we get out the scissors.  We cut our clover field and added little blossoms. 

 

Next, everyone cut out a stem for their clover and glued on their favorite color blossom. 

 

 



 I think everyone did a great job.

 

On Thursday we read a book that most of the class had not heard of, The Cat in the Hat Comes Back .  I think this was our favorite book (so far!) and we had fun putting together our very own "Cat in the Hat".

 

 

Of course, this project was BIG too, but no one seemed to mind!

 

We also had a very special snack on Thursday.  We read the book Green Eggs and Ham and made our very own!  I was afraid one little girl was going to cry when I said we would be eating green eggs but when she realized what we were doing, she came around.  First we made some good 'ole vanilla pudding, then we added green food coloring to it.

 

We started stirring . . . .

We dumped it on our plates . . . .

 

and added a yummy  Nilla Wafer . . . 

Super fun Green Eggs and Ham!

 

Our Fabulous Fun Friday came all too soon!  We started our day by reading The Cat in the Hat and as you can imagine, it was now our favorite!  We all loved Thing One and Thing Two!  They made us giggle, so we made our very own Thing One and Thing Two hair!!!   It was easy, we cut strips of light blue constructions paper

 

and well . . . see . . .

Aren't we cute?????

 

 



We wore them to eat our Dr. Seuss birthday cake which I did not take pictures of, sorry!  But it looked just like the one I did last year . . .

It isn't very fancy but everyone said it tastes really good!

We didn't have time on Friday to read all of Bartholomew and the Oobleck but we did spend some time looking at it and talking about oobleck.  Then we HAD to make our own oobleck, right???  Of course. 

At this point our day got really messy!  We had cornstarch ALL over the kitchen and ourselves.  But we had fun and that was all that mattered.

Thank you for visiting with us.  I hope you stop back again next week, we will be talking about the farm and all the wonderful animals who live there.

Dr. Seuss - Part 2

I have had the best time with my class this past week!  I don't think I have every heard so much giggling and laughing in my entire life.  I'm certainly going to have a tough time next week trying to live up to all the fun we have had talking about Dr. Seuss.  On Wednesday, we read The Lorax - the entire book, the very first thing that morning.  I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to keep my class' attention, but with Dr. Seuss, it wasn't difficult at all!  Everyone talked about the truffula trees the rest of the day.  We even managed to make our very own trees.

 

Everyone loved using feathers for the leaves on the trees!

 

Our Thursday started off with us reading Horton Hears a Who.  We loved it (of course!)!  Afterwards we immediately started working on our art project.  First, we used some sandpaper and crayons to do rubbings for our elephant trunks.  Next we used markers to color our stems and we cut them out.

We have a HUGE container of of pom-poms that are so much fun!  Everyone picked out their favorite colors for the flowers.  Aren't they wonderful?!?!?!?

Our Fabulous Fun Friday was (in my opinion) the very best, so far this year!  We spent the entire day reading and talking about The Cat in the Hat.  We even tried rhyming words - we had so much fun!!!  Our "Cat in the Hat" art project was silly and fun!  First, we cut some long red strips.

Everyone had so much fun singing happy birthday to Dr. Seuss while we glued our fabulous Cat in the Hat all together.

 

 As soon as we ate our lunch we headed down to our kitchen to make our Fabulous Fun Friday snack.  I teased everyone all week by telling them that they were going to eat "green eggs".  To be honest, I'm pretty sure they all knew I was kidding.  We made our green eggs with ice cream!  We added yellow and blue food coloring to turn our ice cream . . .

 GREEN!



Next we added some whipped cream (straight from the can!) for instant Green Eggs and Ham (Mrs. Karen's style!). 

 

Now, you know you can't have a birthday party without cake, right???

I'm no baker and I'm certainly not a cake decorator, but no one complained!  It was a great day, a great week in fact!  HAPPY BIRTHDAY DR. SEUSS!

I guess I've got to get busy!  It is going to be difficult trying to top this week . . . but I think I'm up to it!!!!!!  I hope you come back and see what we will doing next!

Dr. Seuss Week - Part 1

In honor of Dr. Seuss' birthday and "Read Across American", my class is talking about Dr. Seuss ALL WEEK!  That's right, we are spending an entire week reading, writing and laughing with Dr. Seuss.  I just had to hurry and post two VERY special pieces of art work that we did this week.  These first ones were done after we read My Many Colored Days

The children wrote the color they chose!  Aren't they wonderful?!?!?!?!

On Tuesday we read and discussed the book 10 Apples Up On Top and I will admit it has become a class favorite.  Our art project for the day even amazed me! 

Yes, the children wrote the numbers on the apples, then we glued them on top our heads!!!  OH MY!  EVERYONE was giggling and laughing so hard.  It was truly a terrific day!

I'll have more fun Dr. Seuss ideas over the next couple of days, but I couldn't wait to show these to our friends!  Thanks for visiting with it!!!!

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss!

Everything about Friday, March 2, 2012 did not go as I had planned.  Besides being the amazing Dr. Seuss' birthday, it was also the birthday of my dear friend and fellow teacher, Mrs. Christi.  I wanted our pre-school day to be extra, extra special but alias, the real-world got in the way.  After days and days of planning and scheming (I spent days telling all our parents that we would be celebrating TWO birthdays on Friday), I left school on Thursday to head home and bake a birthday cake in the shape of the hat from A Cat in the Hat.  NOPE!  I came home to a refrigerator that was leaking water all over my kitchen.  So after mopping up my floor, finding the problem, deciding it wasn't worth the money to fix the thing, my hubby and I headed out to buy a new refrigerator!  By the time we got home, there was no time for baking.  Luckily, I called one of our moms (and dear, dear friend) and she volunteered to make our my cake!  THANKS TIFFANY!   I headed to bed that night thinking of the fun we would have on Friday.  Again, real life got in the way!  The great state of Alabama (and most of the southeast) woke up Friday to the news that we would be under a severe weather threat all day.  After what has happened to our state in the past 10 months, we in Alabama take severe weather VERY SERIOUSLY.  All the schools in our area made the decision to close early Friday. Our school would be closing at 12:00 noon but since most of the other schools closed at noon too, I knew our parents would pick up first.  RATS!  Sorry, Dr. Seuss!  I had to get moving to make this day a success!

We started our day by changing up our little carpool routine.  I helped Friday and told each child as they got out of the car that they could RUN down the hall to Mrs. Christi's room IF they told her "Happy Birthday"!  OH BOY!  Who doesn't want to run in school?  Christi said everyone ran in yelling "HAPPY BIRTHDAY!"  Many of the children brought her cards and gifts.  It was so fun to watch her face as more, more children came to school.  We talked about Dr. Seuss and sang "Happy Birthday" to him most of the morning.  Our art project was scaled back a bit because of our short day.  I still think it turned out well.

We headed to our kitchen for our Dr. Seuss One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish snack.  I found this printable and enlarged it.

 We loved counting our "fish" and placing them on the counting sheet.

And of course we enjoyed eating Mrs. Christi's birthday cake!

I really wanted to squeeze in our science experiment.  It came from the Dr. Seuss book, Bartholomew and the Oobleck .  WARNING this experiment is very messy!  I got MY recipe from Instructables , of course I didn't follow them EXACTLY (insert evil giggle here!)  Everyone had a lot of fun mixing and making a big mess!

Because our time was short we weren't able to do all activities but we ended our day with a new game.  We called it "HAT, HAT, CAT!"  You play it just like "DUCK, DUCK, GOOSE!" but change out the words!  Everyone and I do mean EVERYONE loved running and playing our new game.

All in all it was a short but great day.  I'm planning on doing a little tweaking to our calendar for next year.  I think we need an entire week to celebrate Dr. Seuss (and Mrs. Christi too)!  

Thanks for visiting us!  I hope you come back soon.  Next week we will be talking about the farm!

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss!

We had a great day!

Yes we did!

That is all I can say,

We had a great Day!

Okay, that was a terrible tribute to the famous Dr. Seuss, but I tried. Today we spent the entire day trying to speak in rhymes. Needless to say some very strange words came out of our mouths, but we had fun, lots and lots of fun. We also sang "Happy Birthday" to Dr. Seuss ALL DAY LONG. It seems like someone was singing the entire day. Again, it was fun! We also read "The Cat in the Hat" and giggled a lot. We also made our very own Cat in a Hat. I just love him. Especially the bow tie, one student had the saddest look on his face after he finished his Cat and I asked him what was wrong. "T" looked at me and said, "you forgot his tie". Oh My! So we quickly added a bow tie to finish him off. Truly today was a great day!