Today we read "Yertle, the Turtle." To help keep their interest in this rather long story I made little turtles from egg cartons that they could stack them as the story progressed.
They had trouble stacking all twelve turtles but enjoyed the challenge. The students spent quite a while playing with the turtles as we talked about how Mack might have felt being on the bottom of the stack and holding the weight of all the turtles.
To keep in the spirit of Dr. Seuss we made our own Seuss characters. We made Thing 1 and Thing 2 puppets from tongue depressors. This was an interesting craft for the students. They didn't quite grasp the concept of using the natural wood for the face. They insisted on coloring it white and then trying to draw a face over the white crayon. It would have worked better if we had used paint instead of crayon.
Next, we started a picture walk through "Cat in the Hat;" but because the students knew the story so well (having read the book and watched the movie) our picture walk ended up as a student retell. After the story, we started a Cat in the Hat pop-up puppet.
The students were getting hungry so we found a good place to stop the craft and had snack. For snack we ate Dr. Seuss Snack Mix, a clementine, and apple juice. One student did not like the snack mix. It was not as sweet as I had expected it to be, I used Lime flavored jello and that may have altered the taste making it a bit tart.
For out door play we placed cones around the yard and did a "Cat in the Hat" race pretending to be Thing 1 and Thing 2. The object was to run a complete circle around each cone and then race to the next cone. To help them remember which cones they had circled, they were to knock down the cone after circling it.
With most of our wiggles out we went back to finish our Cat in the Hat pop up puppets. The students found it difficult to get glue on the whole strip and then onto the hat before the glue dried up. So we modified the process and only placed glue on about 1" at each end. That way we could attach one end, wrap the strip around the hat, and attach the other end with fresh glue.
While the students were diligently working on their hats I put clear packing tape on the front of their cat stack and taped a small dowel to the back. The tape went the full length of the cat stack as a make shift lamination, to help lengthen the life of the puppet.
To finish off the day we did two literacy stations. This one is using the Cc book, the student used the word strips to make sentences to read. The book served as a guide to help identify the correct word for the picture.
The second literacy station was letter matching tiles. There are some Dr. Seuss characters. The student was to look at the lower case letters on the card and cover it with the upper case tile.
Homework was a worksheet "On a Rainy Day" and another Dr. Seuss's ABC book activity. This time the student and an older sibling or parent will go on a scavenger hunt. The older sibling/parent would write the name of the item then together they were to create an adjective that starts with the same letter, for example: angry apple.
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