Seuss Week, Leap Day, and more!

What a crazy week. I LOVE Dr. Seuss and could not cram enough activities into my lesson plans last week.

We read The Sneetches and watched the movie. Of course when we voted, we liked the movie better. I can only do so many silly voices :) We talked about how unfair it was that the plain-bellied Sneetches were treated differently than the star-bellied Sneetches, because no one person was better than the other. We decided in the end, they all got along because they felt good about who they were. So we did a little writing activity about how we feel good about ourselves. Each first grader got a star, and wrote about a quality or talent they have that they are proud of. Many of us were proud of our sports skills :)

 Then we read The Foot Book, and How Big is A Foot? by Rolf Myller and started a discussion about nonstandard measurement. I love Rolf Myller's book! If you are introducing nonstandard measurement to your students, it is the BEST book to use. It really shows the students how different measuring tools are different lengths. Just like the king and the queen in the story, we decided to measure things in our classroom with our feet. You can get a copy of the paper here.

We read Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You? and loved all the sounds he made. We loved them so much that we made our own book of sounds. As first graders, we are working on remembering how to spell and use our last names, so making this book was awesome practice! The writing prompt was: Miss/Mr. ________ can ______, can you? The students had to fill in all the blanks and add an illustration. They turned out so cute! You can have a copy of the book cover and page here. (The book cover picture is a little blurry, but works for my purposes!)

Wednesday was LEAP DAY! Once we were threatened and actually started listening, we had a wonderful day :) I bought Andrea W.'s Leap Day packet from TPT and we loved it! We used so many of her cute ideas! It was perfect for my first graders.

First we read her cute original story, Three Little Leapfrogs. She wrote the story, and my kids each got to illustrate their own story.

Most of my little guys worked really hard on their illustrations and were so proud of their books!

Next, we did her little frog craftivity, and wrote the facts we had learned about leap year! After they wrote their facts and created their frogs, they got to personalize it a little bit. The mustaches and beards were very popular....

In the afternoon, we did math stations using some of the worksheets from the pack. We also made a Leap Day trail mix of 29 different things! We had a great day!

All week I was asked when we were going to read the Lorax! The kids could not believe that no one thought of what would happen when there were no trees left! We thought of all kinds of different ways that we could save the earth. We decided to write a letter to Mother Earth to tell her how we were going to protect her. You can get your copy here!

Unfortunately, I was at a visual phonics workshop (which is really cool by the way) on Friday so I wasn't with my kiddos for Dr. Seuss's actual birthday, but they got to have a fun-filled day of reading his books and have a little treat.

Have a great week! I am jealous of all of you that have a week long spring break. We just have a Friday-Monday deal :(

Sarah