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Friday, March 6, 2015

The Week of Celebrating The Doc!

This week was all about The Doc - Dr. Seuss that is!  This is the first year I have celebrated Read Across America Week with my kiddos and I know that I will continue to celebrate it in the future - we had so much fun!

We were out of school Tuesday - Friday last week, so I was a little stressed that I didn't have snacks prepared and books out when I got to school Monday morning - but that is why I get to school so dag-on early I guess!  Seuss was in full force by the time my kiddos walked through the door.  Luckily - I'm not a procrastinator, so the copies were made and the bulletin board was already up!

LOVE my Dr. Seuss door hanger my mom made for me.  But, I'm so used to having my door covered with cutouts with the kiddos names - that my door looks bare.

Sunday, I hit up Target's dollar spot for some Seuss goodies.  Bought the Cat In The Hat whiteboards just because they were cute.  We didn't end up using them, but I've got them for the future years and I'll come up with a reason to use them.
On our snow days over the past couple weeks, I was able to get some Seussy shirts ready for this week too.  Have I mentioned I love my Cricut Explore?




So, here is a daily breakdown of our week!

Monday:
We read Cat In The Hat and Cat In The Hat comes back.  I had a wonderful parent who prepped our cheese sticks to look like the Cat In The Hat for snack.  We also had jello cups topped with blue whipped topping to look like Thing 1 and Thing 2.



After reading The Cat In The Hat, we did a comprehension activity about identifying the narrator of the book, citing evidence from the story to support our claim (I forgot to take pictures of this activity!)  Then after we read The Cat In The Hat Comes Back, we compared the two stories.  Then it was craft time!  We made Thing 1 through Thing 23 hats and that went perfectly with my "Teacher of all Things" shirt, since they became Things!



On Tuesday, we read Horton Hears a Who.  For snack, we had a Nutter Butter cookie, to represent Horton, since a Nutter Butter looks like an elephant ear, and a bag of fruit loops to be the clover/speck.

For comprehension today, we talked about character traits.  We brainstormed character traits that could describe Horton.  Then, students had to pick 2 character traits and write why that character trait fit Horton.  They then turned those into 2 sentences that we put on writing paper that our Horton craft could go on!




Because our copier doesn't do well with construction paper, and having to color all these pieces would be torture (for me!), I made templates for each table on poster board to trace on their construction paper.  This worked wonderfully!  Each table had a bag of tracing pieces for each day and they just had to trace the pieces and then cut them out.

On Wednesday, we read a favorite - Green Eggs and Ham and had green eggs and ham for snack - kind of!  I have made these pretzel snacks with M&M's since I was in college, so I knew this would be a perfect thing for Green Eggs and Ham.  I used green Sixlets that I found a ACMoore to be the green dot on top.  They turned out cute and yummy!


After we read the book, we wrote about how the narrator felt about green eggs and ham at the beginning, middle, and end.  The beginning and middle is about the same, except he is annoyed in the middle because Sam I Am won't leave him alone.  We then did a little Green Eggs & Ham poetry where the kiddos had to write about something that they didn't like to eat.  The problem came when they had to find rhyming words - they just gave up to easily!




On Thursday we read The Lorax.  We had Teddy Grahams (Brown Bar-Ba-Loots) and marshmallows snack mix.  Note - don't mix these two far ahead of time like I did.  The marshmallows got hard the cookies got a little soft.  The flavor was fine, but it wasn't as good as it would have been if I hadn't mixed them early.  Next year, I'm going to nix the marshmallows and get fruity Trix to be the Truffla seeds/trees.


For our comprehension activity and craft, we did two activities - writing about how Dr. Seuss wrote this book with the purpose of Persuading, Informing, and Entertaining.  Then on the flip side, the wrote about the main idea with 3 details.  Our craft was making a Lorax topper and I let the kids choose which side of their worksheet they wanted to show on the front.



Today, we had a 3-hour delay due to rain yesterday followed by plunging temps last night with a fear of black ice.  Really, we could have gone to school on time, but I like sleeping till 7 AM, exercising, having an omelet for breakfast, and then going to school about 10 AM!

So, since school started at 11:15 AM and the kiddos went to PE at 11:35, we did math whole group this afternoon which made for a quick lesson, and then we did our Seuss activity for the day.  After we watched the original Lorax during lunch, I read If I Ran The Zoo for today.  After our money lesson in math, they made up their own animals for their Crazy Zoo and drew pictures of their animals.  All while eating animal cookies for an afternoon snack.










Our Seuss board filled with work from the whole week!

I was so thankful this week for wonderful parents who supplied most all of the snack items.  My mom and I just put them together at night.  I thing this week was memorable for all the kiddos and they wanted to know what we were going to do next week!

Well, I had to bust their bubble that we weren't going to keep having special snacks next week, but we are going to do integrated Language Arts and Social Studies activities everyday from my All About The Money economics unit.  We have a field trip to the mall and Kanki, which is a Japanese steakhouse.  After we eat lunch at Kanki, they kiddos are going to hit the mall for an economics scavenger hunt!  I'm excited about this trip and hopefully it will be a successful one that we can continue for years to come!

Have a great weekend y'all!  It is still freezing here today in NC, but 50's and 60's are in the forecast for next week, so maybe old man winter is leaving!

2 comments:

  1. I teach 2nd too in NC !! I LOVE your ideas!!! Thank you for sharing :-)
    Karen
    tommysmom0206@yahoo.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unfortunately, we had snow days Wednesday through Friday so our celebrating Dr. Seuss was cut short. Would you be able to do a post on using your Cricut Explore? You make the cutest shirts and I was thinking of getting one myself.

    ReplyDelete