During the month of March we’ve been celebrating NEA’s Read Across America. March 02 was Dr. Seuss’ birthday and we had a little “celebration” here at home.

We began our day with A Splendiferous Dr. Seuss Breakfast of Green Eggs and “Ham” served with Moose Juice and our bread butterside up!

We watched Horton Hears a Who!

Adaline and I read some Dr. Seuss books. We read the board book version of “Happy Birthday to You” then I read Adaline “Hop on Pop”, “Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You?”, The Cat in the Hat, and “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish” for the first time. Hop and Pop and Mr. Brown are now favorites. When reading the Cat in the Hat she likes to point out “Sally” and “Baby” (the unnamed brother) on each page and she gets a little irritated when I don’t read fast enough for her to turn the page and find Sally again.
(After reading her Hop on Pop and Mr. Brown only two times on two different days Adaline began bringing me the books and saying “Mr. Bonk Moo” (Bonk = Brown) and “Hop Pop”. I couldn’t believe she’d remembered the names of the books when I’d only read them to her twice!)

I traced Adaline’s hand for some projects that I wanted to do. She didn’t really like getting her hand traced, but she was excited to see it after it was done. I had to trace back over them since her fingers looked crazy 😉
(That’s not some strange cryptic code…Adaline’s been into letters lately especially since Dr. Seuss’ ABC is one of her favorite books so she’s always asking me to draw O, G, or B on her coloring sheets.)

(Yes, I did a wardrobe change…I’m fancy like that.)

Next I traced Adaline’s feet on to cardstock. She seemed to like that a little better than the hands (I don’t think she likes the crayon going in between her fingers).

I let Adaline color her hand and foot tracings.

I wasn’t brave enough this year to stick her hands or feet in any paint, so the tracings will have to do.
I plan on saving this foot tracing and doing something similar each year and putting it all together as her own “Foot Book”. As she gets older maybe we’ll include some real footprints and other things. We’ll have a Dr. Seuss project that we can work on every year and have a keepsake too 🙂
(I held Adaline’s hand and together we wrote out “Foot Book” and her name.)

I had a different plan for the handprints. Adaline really loves Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose. She’s not interested in the story so much as she just loves the illustrations of Thidwick. She’s since replaced her love of Thidwick with the ABC book, but she still really loves to look at that moose.
I thought that I’d use Adaline’s hand tracings as Thidwick’s antlers. Using Adaline’s crayons I traced Thidwick from the book cover (I don’t have time for free hand!). I took the drawing and scanned it into the computer and printed out a copy on cardstock. I cut out Adaline’s handprints (also drawn on cardstock) and glued them over top of Thidwick’s antlers. Ta-da…

The problem is that I should’ve left Thidwick’s original antlers out of my drawing and pasted the hands coming directly out of his head. For whatever reason I drew the antlers anyway, but her hands weren’t big enough to cover them completely, so I had to move them up so that the other antlers didn’t show. This just makes it look like Thidwick is wearing gloves on his antlers. Oh well.

We had a great week celebrating Dr. Seuss. Adaline seemed to enjoy all of the activities we did and the readings that we attended (at Target and the library) and she even liked the green food that we ate. It seems as though she’s in the beginning stages of becoming quite the Dr. Seuss fan (yay!). She really has a love of books and reading and I’m so excited to encourage that and make it fun for her.

How did you celebrate Dr. Seuss’ birthday?
Let me know in the comments!

Seuss Fails 2011 / Dr. Seuss Celebration at the Library 2011 / Dr. Seuss Storytime at Target 2011 / Read Across America with Dr. Seuss 2011

This post is linked to…

The Ultimate Dr. Seuss Linky Party 2012 @ Mom to 2 Posh Lil Divas, Ready. Set. Read!, Reading Confetti, Montessori Tidbits, Make, Do & Friend, Putti Prapancha, Kitchen Counter Chronicles, Living at the Whitehead’s Zoo, Mama Mia’s Heart2Heart, Living Montessori Now, Kindergarten for Teachers and Parents, Toddler Approved, Creativity My Passion, Rainbows Within Reach, PreK and K Sharing