Preschool: Dr. Seuss

 National Read Across America Day is on March 2 every year, to celebrate Dr. Seuss' birthday! This was always a fun theme for Honey Pot and Little M&M. Sweet E did a few activities this year too, but we focused just on The Cat in the Hat, one of her favorite Seuss books!

Thing 1 and Thing 2 Blow Painting

I took an image of Thing 1 and Thing 2 from the internet, and erased their hair in Photoshop Elements. Then I watered down some blue paint, dropped a bit above each head, and showed Sweet E how to blow through the straw.

This was a fun way to paint, and looks super cute when it's done!

Visual Discrimination - Hat Matching

I've had this matching game since 2013! The free printable comes from Joyfully Weary, and I've used it with all three kids!

Gluing Rhymes

This free printable comes from TotSchooling. Rhymes were such a hard concept for Sweet E, but it has finally clicked for her! She often brings it up in conversation now, pointing out rhymes that she knows.

Scissor Practice

I just used some Cat in the Hat stickers, and drew tracing lines leading up to them.

Sweet E loved this, and asked for more when she finished!

Upper/Lowercase Matching

This free printable also comes from TotSchooling. Instead of printing out all the letters though, Sweet E used a paper punch to make red and white circles from scrap paper, and I wrote the letters on. We left this out on her table throughout the day, and she came back to it to match up the letters throughout the day. Doing 26 at once is a bit project!

Board Games

We happen to have two Cat in the Hat games in our game closet, and they are two of her favorite games ever! Highly, highly recommend these for 3-4 year olds! We pulled these out often to play this week!

Creative Table - Week 3 {Dr. Seuss}

Because of all of the Magic Tree House activities we've done this week, I kept our Dr. Seuss theme limited to just one day. I pulled out a couple of favorite activities from previous years, and added a couple new ones. I set them out as "invitations" around our dining room table. Take a look:

The Lorax Invitation - Truffula Tree Roll and Cover

I created this activity two years ago (please see 2015 link at the bottom of this post to find the free printable). The kids enjoy these fuzzy pompoms and the finished product is super cute.

Tongs are always optional! Little M&M even swapped the orange pair out for the nearby pink pair to allow himself a better grip.

Honey Pot had school today, so she bounced around from invitation to invitation immediately upon coming home! Love her Cat in the Hat hat!

The Cat in the Hat Invitation - Matching Game

We've been doing this one since 2013! The printable came from Joyfully Weary. There are actually 20 cards total, but when I prepared this for a 2-year-old I wanted to keep it simpler. Definitely time for me to print out the complete set though, because they flew through this!

The Cat in the Hat Invitation - Stamping Patterns

I found a cute set of stamps in the Target Dollar Spot and wanted to include them in today's activities. So I printed this pattern sheet from This Reading Mama.

I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew Invitation - Fine Motor Flowers

This is actually one of our very favorite Dr. Seuss books. And there is no mention of it on Pinterest anywhere! So I came up with our own little fine motor activity to recreate the flowers from "the banks of the beautiful river Wah-Hoo." I cut some white chenille stems in half and poked them into some floral foam I had purchased from the Dollar Tree a while back. For a couple of them, I attached another piece to serve as a second branch. Then I used a circle punch to cut out lots of colorful circles, and used a hole punch through the center.

Little M&M, who is just shy of turning 5 years old, just loved this activity. He spent a good while placing the flowers on the stems. First he tried to include one of each color on each stem, and then he began sorting them by color.

He even had a story going on in his head, because all the little flower circles were talking to each other! This activity provided great fine motor practice, and apparently some wonderful imaginative play too!

This is the finished product, and I think it looks adorable!

When Honey Pot returned from school she gave it a go, but our nearly 7-year-old just wanted to put one flower on each before moving on to a different invitation. But for the preschool set...this is a winning activity!

    

Horton Hears a Who Invitation - Finding the Speck

I first saw this idea from Inner Child Fun. It is meant to recreate this sad scene from the book, in which Horton searches over 3 million clovers to find the one with his speck of dust!

So I set out two buckets and a collection of pom poms, with only one pom pom containing the "speck of dust." To make the speck I just put a dab of hot glue on one of them.

For younger kids, definitely set out fewer pom poms, because this was work!

Here are Little M&M and Honey Pot after finding their Who friends' speck of dust:

The Cat in the Hat Puzzle

Little M&M also pulled out our floor puzzle to complete in celebration of Dr. Seuss today. He just loves this!

For more fun, please take a look back at the fun activities we've done since we first started our Tot School:

Dr. Seuss 2012



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



Dr. Seuss 2014



Dr. Seuss 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 2012

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

Dr. Seuss 2014

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.

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