Read Across America Day (March 2nd) is a great opportunity to do creative activities with your kids and their friends. Here are some things you can do to promote reading and celebrate the Seuss in yourself!
Make Bookmarks. This is a very simple task, and lots of fun. Tri-fold a piece of card stock and cut on folded lines to create three pieces of paper. They should be about the size of a big bookmark. Decorate them with markers, stickers, fabric, ribbon, or anything you can think of. Get creative. Just make sure that you keep your final book mark product flat so that it will be welcomed into any book. Once that is done, it might be time to make a trip to the public library to check out several books you and your kids can read together. The new book marks can come in handy!
Write a silly group rhyming book. My kids and I have a blast doing this, and it costs nothing at all but the one or two dollars for the purchase of the notebook. One person starts the first silly rhyme line, and then passes the notebook to the next person. Each person has to add to the story, attempting to come up with a plot.
Another version of this (which works well with kids who are upper elementary or older) is for everyone participating in the activity to take a paper and write an opening storyline on it. With everyone sitting in a circle, you then pass your paper to the left. Reading only the last line written, you write a line on the new paper (the one that used to be with the person on your right), folding the paper so that when you pass it again to the left, the next person in the circle can only read and respond to the line that you wrote. Keep passing/folding down until it comes back around to you. (It will now need to be unfolded.) This is especially fun with a group of ten or more. We laugh when the stories get read out loud. Everyone remembers writing their own line, and it’s fun to see how the lines come together – or in most cases, don’t! Very silly.
Make green sugar cookies and write “Eggs” or “Ham” on them with white or green frosting in a bag with a round tip. Serve them while reading Dr. Seuss books.
Here is a simple recipe for cookies:
2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup butter, softened
1 1/2 cups white sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
enough green food coloring to get the desired result.
Mix dry ingredients separately from butter, sugar, egg, food coloring and vanilla. Next, blend the ingredients together and chill for one hour to make handling easier (if you plan to roll them out.)
Once shaped, bake them for about ten minutes at 350 degrees.
For this kind of simple project, store-bought decorating frosting (already in the tube with several tips to choose from) works really nicely. It doesn’t taste as good as homemade, but it makes clean-up pretty simple.
Read the original “Horton Hears a Who,” and follow it up with the movie.
Attend a musical. Check around in cities within driving distance and see if you can find a theater company which is doing Seusical, Jr. Take your kids to attend if you can afford it. (This might take a little advance planning, but it is a worthy adventure!)
Have fun!
