When was the last time you sat down and read a Dr. Seuss book? Did you know that Dr. Seuss’ birthday is coming up on March 2nd? This week we began an exploration into Dr. Seuss books. We had some brave student readers who read to the whole class. We created a “What We Notice About” chart full of things we noticed about his books. They are usually hard cover, they have silly rhymes, he used his imagination to create characters, the pictures don’t use a lot of straight lines etc.
The class noticed different word families that Dr. Seuss used in his books and the way they flow when we read them. We talked about how these books remind us of poems because some poems rhyme too. This lead to us looking at other rhyming books in our classroom and noticing the word choice in them. Naturally we decided to create our own Dr. Seuss inspired rhymes! We worked through the steps of ” I Do” which means when I work through my own rhyme on the chart paper. I shared my thought process and editing by using crosscuts and carrots when needed. Next it was time for the “We Do”. Together we worked through a rhyme that painted a silly picture in our heads. By this time the Super Kids were eager to try on their own, which we call “You Do”.
The poems that they have started to create are wonderful! They are creative and paint a silly picture in the reader’s head. As you can see they could pick their own writing paper and we aren’t finished yet, but their ideas are fantastic! We plan to make a book of our silly rhymes to share with our families at conferences and our buddy classes.
Keeping on our Dr. Seuss theme, we created our own Seuss inspired houses in art class! We welcoming our 1/2 buddies from Mrs. Haines’ class for our lesson too. We began by watching a video about Dr. Seuss houses and through some direct teaching, the students learned how to draw stairs, 3D doorways, and windows. We practiced on our whiteboards first and when we felt comfortable we tried on our drawing paper. The results are fantastic! I can’t wait to display them. 🙂
If you are noticing some Dr. Seuss books coming home for home reading you now understand why. We are eager to read them, work on our flow, and notice the silly language.
Hope you have a great weekend.
