1-2-3 Come Celebrate Wacky Wednesday With Me!
As you continue March is Reading Month, Why not plan on having a Wacky Wednesday next week. It' one of my favorite days. See if you can get your entire school involved to make it even more fun. It’s one of my students’ favorite Seuss books.
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Here’s how to go about being wacky.
Dress Wacky:
Send a letter home to parents explaining the day, and asking them to help their child dress as wacky as possible. Give them a few suggestions.
Our entire school is involved in March is Reading Month so we have a panel of teachers that get together to think up ideas for the whole school to take part in all month long. Wacky Wednesday is one of them. Your wacky day doesn’t have to fall on the 2nd. It can be any Wednesday in March.
Students come to school dressed wacky. One pant leg is up, one is down, T-shirts are backwards or inside out, plaids are put together with stripes. Hair is spray painted several colors or perhaps teased. Girls may have one braid and one pigtail, or perhaps their ponytail sticks out of the side of their head.
Underwear or boxer shorts are worn on the outside of your pants, buttons are buttoned wrong, and neckties are knotted or tied around your forehead. A person can wear two different colored socks, or a sneaker and a boot. Orange can be worn with pink and purple and stripes look marvelous with polka dots; the wackier the better. Each teacher sends their wackiest students down to the atrium to get their picture taken for the school newsletter.
Wack out your room:
Besides dressing wacky, rearrange a few things in your room. I take all of my chairs away and put them in a line in the hallway. My students have to sit on the floor UNDER the tables of course. All of my posters are upside down, and just like in the story I've used poster putty to have a shoe walking up the wall. My clock is upside down, their calendar says October, our alphabet starts with ZYX and ends with ABC. Use your imagination and have fun! I challenge my students to find all the things that are wacky in our room.
Plan some wacky activities:
On their desks are new desk name cards. Their names are spelled backwards and I’m no longer Mrs. Henderson, but Mrs. Nosredneh. It takes a bit of time, but soon they find their new wacky name card.
They also don their new nametag so that I can remember what to call them through out our wacky day.
Instead of greeting them “Good morning!” and saying “Hello!” to them. I say “Good evening!” and “Good-bye!”
Instead of walking forward they must walk backward. They really LOVE this one and it’s a great gross motor movement that’s not as easy as it looks.
I also give them an FYI that when I say “No.” I mean “Yes” only for the 1st hour of class. Their Table Top lessons are numbered from 10 to 1, and we do all of our counting that day in reverse.
We also say our alphabet in reverse. I read our morning message backwards.
Story Time:
For story time we read Dr. Seuss’s Wacky Wednesday of course, but I also have several other books that I read that my students really enjoy: Gerald McBoing Boing, Seuss; Topsy-Turvy Day, James; and Silly Sally, by Wood. I laminate the various characters in Silly Sally, pass them out to my students and we sequence them.
As I’m reading Wacky Wednesday, I hold up the book so that my students can find the things. I enjoy this book because of the “can you find?” aspect of it. It’s a great skill for students to practice and this one really sharpens their observation skills. It’s also a counting book. “… if you can find the last 20 wacky things you can go back to bed.”
I make an overhead of the last 2 pages and we circle the wacky things as my students find them. We keep a tally sheet so we know we have found all 20. I toss a plush Cat in the Hat at the end of the day and the child holding the cat gets to share what their favorite thing was that they did on Wacky Day.
As they file out of the door on the way to their bus, I wish them a “Good morning!” and wave “Hello!”
