Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss!

We had lots of fun this week celebrating Dr. Seuss's birthday!  In my opinion the man was an absolute genius, as evidenced by the numbers of children that still love his books, and the numbers of children that have learned to read using his books!  Thank you, thank you, Dr. Seuss!

We started off the week with classic Cat in the Hat.  We tried to balance as many things as the Cat could!

We made Cat in the Hat hats with -at family words on them!  

At math time it was time for Green Eggs and Ham!  First we followed a recipe to cook them, and then tried the eggs and made a graph of who liked them and who did not!  We even put a candle in the eggs and sang Happy Birthday to Dr. Seuss!

We had a couple of surprised kids who were doubtful, but got brave enough to try them and found out that they DID like green eggs and ham after all!

Monday was just a wonderful day of cooking, as in the afternoon we made colored star cookies to reinforce our learning about different sizes and colors of stars, and the different temperatures stars can be.

Continuing our study of space and stars, we read legends about how several of the constellations got put up in the sky.  Did you know the story of the Great Bear, or Ursa Major?  It was put up in the sky because the friend of one of the Goddesses got turned into a bear, and she wanted to put him up there so he wouldn't get taken by a hunter!  Then the kids created new constellations, and wrote legends about how they got put up in the sky!  They were wonderful stories, and are up in the hallway by the lunchroom for you to see!

We learned about greater than/less than in math, and of course the old analogy of the alligator that wants to eat the bigger number.  So... we made alligator puppets, and played a game where we rolled dice and the alligator puppets had to "eat" the dice with the bigger number!  

Of course, they ended up eating other things as well... like my finger! :)

We continued Dr. Seuss celebrations all week with Dress-up Days, and on Friday we made Yertle the Turtles and stacked them on top of each other.  Poor Mack on the bottom. :(
We had some great discussions this week about the lessons that Dr. Seuss put into all of his stories, like the Grinch, Star-Belly Sneetches, Green Eggs and Ham, and Yertle the Turtle.  The kids were able to find some wonderful lessons!  "Try something before you decide you don't like it." "Christmas is about love not about presents," and "No one should be the boss of anyone else" were just a few of the morals they found in the stories.