Dr. Seuss is On the Loose!

Hi friends!  I hope this isn't too late for Dr. Seuss' birthday.  This post will contain places to find games, links to people reading books, freebies, and some ideas that worked in my kindergarten class.

Let's start with games, because our kids just love them and so do we!  I found some really great games on the PBS Kids web site.  The games are fabulous for pre-k or kindergarten in my opinion, because the characters are giving the students directions and they're really easy to follow.  I just found this site today!  I'm very excited to try them out tomorrow.  Some of the games cover skills like mapping, visual-spatial, size sequencing, position, shape recognition, and rhyming of course.  Seussville is also cool.  The games on that site are dealing more with coordination, but there are also some really nice activities in PDF format that you can print out for your class.  For first grade there are some rhyming and alphabetical order pages in the Cat in the Hat booklet.  For pre-k and kindergarten there are some mazes and coloring papers.  I'm going to try the rhyming sheet with my middle and top kids; I don't think my low kids would be able to do it.

There's a Wocket in my Pocket is a really cool Dr. Seuss book that I never read before.  I'm really not sure why, because I think it'll make an excellent writing prompt.  I'm just going to give the children the sentence frame "There's a _____ in my _____." and have them complete it using their imagination (for example, "There's a melevision in my television.") and then have the children draw a picture of that.  I'll then put them together to make a class book.  Here is a link to a video of a nice reading of the book:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlmyfyjc7hM.  Did you know that this is the shortest Dr. Seuss book?

We also read Green Eggs and Ham, and I made a comprehension graphic organizer for the kids to distinguish what was in the story and what wasn't in the story.

Graphic Organizer Green Eggs and Ham by Sharon A Blachowicz Dudley

The students really enjoyed the reading of Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You?  They just got so into it and how to make the sounds!  I think this is an excellent book for ESOL children.  I want to add sound effects to the experience - I'll probably make that CD over the weekend.

I made this guided reading book to help the kids remember what books we've read this week.

Dr Seuss Book by Sharon A Blachowicz Dudley

We also watched the video of Horton Hatches The Egg and had a great discussion about responsibility.  The children were really upset at Mayzie, but in the discussion she still thought it was her egg.  It was very interesting!

Here is a fact sheet about Dr. Seuss that you might find helpful, so that you don't have to spend time looking up all of the information yourself.

Dr Seuss Facts by Sharon A Blachowicz Dudley

I would really enjoy hearing about the things you do for Dr. Seuss' birthday!