Saturday, March 16, 2013

Tot School: Celebrating Dr. Seuss




We spent the first two weeks of March celebrating Dr. Seuss’ birthday.  I took a book a day and we read the book and did activities based on that book.  Here's a little of what we’ve been doing:

Cat in the Hat:
Decorated a hat for the cat to wear



Saw how many books we could balance:
 
 
 
 
We were almost as good as the cat!  "Sunshine" decided she wanted in on this one too:


Horton Hears a Who:
We mixed black and white paint to make gray.  Then finger-painted white paper gray and used it to create giant ears and a trunk to wear.  I found this activitiy here and just slightly adapted it for our book.



After putting on their ears and trunks,  they acted out Horton Hatches the Egg by seeing who could sit he longest on the egg. 
 
Any guesses who won? :)

Then because “Miss Priss” is ALL into Doc McStuffins right now, Horton also needed a check-up.
 
 

Daisy Head Mayzie:

Daisy Color By Number.  This was our first color-by-number and was very simple.  I just drew it out; however, she loved it and we'll definitely be doing more of these!
 


Role played Daisy with hats and fake daisies

The Lorax:

And my favorite Seuss activitiy this year-making Truffula trees!  I found it here.  First of all we went outside and collected some small sticks. Next, we dipped cotton balls into water with food coloring.
 
 
Then, we painted our sticks different colors. 
 
 
After letting them dry all night we gently fluffed out our cotton balls and attached them to the sticks.  Here's our finished product:
 
 

We also watched The Lorax movie.

Tot Trays: 

This month I’m splitting our Tot Trays into 3 Dr. Suess related trays and 3 Easter trays.  Here are the 3 we’ve been using so far this month:
 
  1. Based on There's a Wocket in my Pocket. Grab a handful of letters and/or numbers and place them in the pocket.  Then you pull them out one at a time identifying them.  We also placed letters/numbers in the pocket by color.  One activity I saw used a small and large pocket and you could sort upper/lower case letters.
 
 
      2.   Based on Green Eggs and Ham.  I took several of our green Easter eggs and wrote or used stickers to put different items on the egg pieces.  I used upper/lower case letters, color dots, and shapes. She then matched them up.  This probably would have been much more challenging if our green eggs hadn't been so different!
 
 
       
 
           3.   Based on the book One Fish, Two Fish.   She sorted colored goldfish and placed them on a chart.  Then counted how many of each color.  We also talked about which color in which she had the most and least.  There's also another mat with numbers inside goldfish bowls.  We haven't done this one yet but will by the end of the month.
 
 
 
 
Tot Notebooks:
 
To be honest, I never got around to printing out our Dr. Suess pages.  However, I did find a Seuss Preschool Pack here.
 "Miss Priss" still had several pages she hadn't done from last month so our Tot Notebook hasn't changed.
 
 
If you'd like to see what we did last year for Dr. Seuss' birthday check out this. You can also check out my March Tot School Pinterest Board for more Seuss ideas and for some Easter ideas.  We're going to start doing Easter on Monday!