Cat in the Hat Day

  Monday we celebrated Dr. Seuss's birthday by participating in a school wide read in.  The first half hour of school all the students lined the hallways and just read.  Even the teachers and our principal dropped everything to read.  The Connected Ones brought silly hats and smiles to school Monday to celebrate Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat.  The first theme day of our Dr. Seuss week!  Dr. Seuss was a master at rhyming.  In his honor, we made rhyming hats.  Each student received a different word family on the brim of a hat.  They had to write a word in that family on each stripe of the hat.  We tried to make the hats as tall as possible by spelling more and more words.

 The students worked very hard on their rhymes.  I love how they used their tools.  Many students used word family sliders from around our classroom.  They also used the app Word Wizard.  Word Wizard is a moveable alphabet for $2.99.  The app says the words as the students build them.  It also lets them  know if words are spelled correctly.  So students could build and try words with the word family and check their spelling.  Awesome.  Many students found their hats were getting too big for their desks and had to move to the floor.  Our hard work is hanging up in the hallway.  We have several Dr. Seuss literacy centers this week.  One used rhyming hats similar to the ones we made.  The students chose a hat, read the words on the hat, then made a silly Seuss sentence using at least three of the words.

During math we played some Thing 1 and Thing 2 Bump, an addition game.  Students had so much fun with the game, they didn't even realize how much adding practice they were doing!

Later in the day, after reading both The Cat in the Hat and The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, we did our daily graph.  At the end of The Cat in the Hat, Dr. Seuss asks if you would tell your mom about the adventure if it happened to you.  The kids answered the question in a graph; however, they didn't use their names....in case moms were going to see it!  Instead we used our "Thing" numbers!   Good news, most kids would tell mom!

We also read a little about Dr. Seuss and had some birthday treats in his honor.  We made ourselves into "Things."  Then we did a guided drawing of the Cat in the Hat.  The students were so careful and followed the directions carefully.  The drawings turned out fabulously!  Take a look at a few of the examples.

 We love The Cat in the Hat!