Monday, March 2, 2015

Dr. Seuss!

We love celebrating Dr. Seuss's birthday! Take a look at our past Dr. Seuss themes, or keep scrolling to see what we did this week:

Dr. Seuss 2013 (One of our most popular posts!)

Books

We borrowed a lot of Dr. Seuss books from the library, and combined them with our collection from home. We did a TON of reading this week! I lost my voice a few times from reading so much. So happy they love Dr. Seuss as much as I do! The kids' favorites were the two Horton books, I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew and Gerald McBoing Boing.


The Cat in the Hat Games

Our first activity of the week was the matching game from Joyfully Weary, which we've enjoyed many years in a row now. What a great game! It sure gets tricky, and this isn't even all of the hats. The original game has twenty!


We also completed our big Cat in the Hat floor puzzle. It turned out to also be a good exercise in turn-taking. 




Truffula Tree Roll and Cover

I created this game for the kiddos. Last year we did a fun truffula tree craft with dyed cottonballs, remember that one? This year I wanted to create the trees with pom poms. They loved it!

Here is the invitation to play:




So much fun!


Want one? Here you go!


Pom Pom Fine Motor Activity

Little M&M created his own activity afterward with these pom poms, using tongs and little baby food cups that we keep near the pom pom bucket. He does this activity all the time, with various kinds of fine motor tools. I love that he can pull them out and sit down to do it all on his own!



Word Family Cat Hats

This idea comes from Finding the Teachable Moments. Honey Pot and I have been doing a lot of these early reading activities, and she's getting great at sounding out CVC words. So we did words in the following families: -at, -et, -it, -ot and -ut. She put the letters in each stripe of the hat, and read the word. Then she'd have to decide if it was a real word or not. There were always 2-3 letters that didn't form a real word. This was a great activity!








The Shape of Me and Other Stuff

We pulled out the playdoh this week for a couple of shape activities to go along with this Dr. Seuss book. First I grabbed random items, and the kids had to match them up based on the shape their impressions made in the playdoh. 



Then we did it with shape puzzle pieces:




Great review of shapes!

Who's Asleep Score - Tally Marks

I introduced Honey Pot to tally marks today. The first part of this activity was putting all of their toys to sleep. The kids LOVED this! Then we walked around the house, taking our own Who's Asleep Score.


Little M&M was great at counting up the little piles of sleepers.


And Honey Pot worked on making tally marks!


She did the first few sets, and then took over the counting while I finished up the tallys. Finally, she worked on skip counting by 5's as she counted all her tally sets. She came to 80 and wrote the number.


Pretty cool activity.








*****************************************************