Connected Combo: Happy Birthday, Dr. Suess!

Thursday 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 Combo wore their unusual hats to school Thursday to celebrate Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat. Our Scholastic News was all about Dr. Seuss. We learned many interesting facts about the famous author. For example, Dr. Seuss collected silly hats because he thought wearing silly hats gave him funny ideas to write about! It must have worked because he published over 40 books in his lifetime. We had special birthday cupcakes in celebration of Dr. Seuss.

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. Click here to hear the book rapped in 6 minutes. 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! The children also loved making the guided drawings of the Cat in the Hat and Thing One and Two. They did a great job listening to directions and being patient with themselves. I love that the drawings all turned out different but still look "right." Thanks, Miss Crystal for the fun snack, it was really inspiring during art today.

We also read and discussed the rhymes in One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. Dr. Seuss is a master rhymer. We made our own rhyming hats. 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.