The schedule for the two weeks was that we would cover an author/illustrator each day.....I would begin by showing the students some pictures of the person and giving them some biographical information. Then we would read a few stories and create some sort of craft. Thanks to Pinterest I was able to find some really great activities for the kids to do!
This was my bulletin for this class.....it is kind of hard to tell but it says "authors and illustrators" and in the hat is the famous Dr. Seuss quote "Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive that is Youer than You".
Here are a few activities we did when we learned about Dr. Seuss.
When we read One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish we had colored goldfish and did a sorting and graphing activity.
When we read The Cat in The Hat we made these little puppets and also made cute hats out of tissue paper.....these turned out adorable!
Probably my favorite little Dr. Seuss craft we did was our Horton. We read the book Horton Hears a Who and then we made these little elephants out of toilet paper rolls. I was really surprised how cute these turned out!! Note to self or anyone else that is thinking about doing this craft.......it took about 3 times as long as I thought it would take!
When we learned about Jan Brett we read The Mitten and then made our own mittens and filled them with the animals from the story.
We also read The Keeping Quilt by Patricia Polacco. For this activity we made our own quilts. I went to Michaels (who just so happened to have all of their scrapbook paper 50% off!!) and got several different types of scrapbook paper. Then I cut them into two inch squares and had the students glue the squares onto a piece of card stock.
My great-grandmother (who died before I was born) loved to quilt. I think she quilted more than anyone else I have ever known about.....I mean we're talking a serious quilter here! Anyway she made enough quilts that I have 5 of hers (she had over 7 great-grandchildren and we all got that many.....not to mention how many our parents and grandparents got!). These quilts are one of my most valued possessions.....especially now since I have started quilting myself. I brought one of the quilts she made (this one is actually my cousins...who is my roommate) to show the students how quilts are pieced together. I was really surprised at how much the kids loved getting to look at this quilt. They came up to it and touched it so gently.....I even had a few that remarked on how good it smelled! I was so happy to be able to share something like this with my students! I think it would have made my grandmother very proud!
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| The finished project. |
When we studied Eric Carle we got to do a lot of cute crafts. This one was for The Very Lonely Firefly. I love how this student added his own drawings to the face of the dragonfly!
When we read The Grouchy Ladybug the kids created their own grouchy ladybugs. I took pictures of the kids faces (I told them to make a mean face.....some of them were hilarious!) and then I cut them out and glued them onto their ladybugs.
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| This was for when we read The Very Hungry Caterpillar. |
We had several other cute projects, but for some reason my phone and camera started acting up this summer so I lost a lot of the pictures that I took.
We also talked about the writing process and even made our own class book. We based our book off Bill Martin Jr.'s Brown Bear Brown Bear......I was so impressed with the students on how they were able to make the story fit together. Again I wish I had pictures to show of that because it really was great, but oh well....hopefully by the time I teach this class again I will have a new camera!
