1-2-3 Come Review Vowels With The Cat and the Hat and Me

As you add vocabulary words to your word wall, it's a good idea to continue to reinforce vowel sounds with your students.  With this in mind, I thought it would be fun to do something with a Seuss theme to review vowels.   The Cat in the Hat seemed like the perfect helper. 

Using the sweet clip art of myclipartstore.com,  I designed Seuss's tall cat to represent long vowels, and then made a shorter cat for the short vowels. 

There's a template with all of the vowels on one page, (upper and lowercase versions) as well as patterns with all of the cats showing one letter.  This way you can choose to work on one vowel at a time, or all five, picking your pattern accordingly. 

Run the cats off, trim and then glue them to the appropriate short and long vowel boxes.  I used turquoise paper for the long vowels, and yellow paper for the short vowels.  Glue them together, laminate, trim and attach to a Popsicle stick with glue dots.  

To easily sort and differentiate, use a different colored Popsicle stick for each vowel group. (For example, all of the A's are on red sticks, the E's on yellow etc.) 

I've included a comprehensive list of words for all of the long vowels, as well as a list for all of the short vowels.  I drew from elementary word wall lists, as well as the Dolch lists (PK-3rd) so that you have a nice variety to choose from.

Pass out whatever vowel cat paddles that you want to work on, call out a word from your list, and have students flip and hold up their cat paddle with the answer.  You can see at a glance who is having difficulty. 

If you want to cover all of the vowels at the same time, only the students with that vowel cat hold up their stick.  Click on the link to view/download the Vowel Cat in the Hat Paddles packet. 

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"Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one. " -Dr. Seuss

1-2-3 Come Write With Me! Waddle You Write About?

I love using a poster as a segue for a writing assignment.  Dr. Seuss's "Lucky Duckie" quotation is a great vehicle for that. 

It's from his book Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?  which is a wonderful story for discussing the theme of contentment, and being happy with who you are.

"Thank goodness for all of the things you are not! Thank goodness you're not something someone forgot...That's why I say, "Duckie! Don't grumble! Don't stew!  Some critters are much-much, oh, ever so much-much, so muchly much-much more unlucky than you!"

Print off the poster and share it with your students. In a discussion before hand, brainstorm why a person is lucky.  What things do they have, that others who don’t live in America, or who are poor, don’t have etc.

Print off the cover for the class book + the writing prompt page for each of your students. 

Remind them of beginning capitalization, end punctuation and spaces between their words and you have covered 3 common core standards.

Students trace the beginning prompt and then complete the sentences: "I think I'm a lucky ducky because..." and "I'm glad I don't..."

Collect and collate the pages and share the completed book with your class, by having each student read their page when you come to it.   If you don't want to make a class book, you can use the duck template and make an adorable spring bulletin board for March is Reading Month.

Here's How: Run off the ducks on yellow construction paper.  
Students cut them out and then write why they feel they are lucky.  

For more pizzazz, add a wiggle eye. student photo, feather, and a 3 dimensional beak. Mount the ducklings on a blue background bulletin board, so that the ducks look like they are swimming in a pond.  Add clouds to the sky.

Glue the poster to a sheet of pastel construction paper and put it in the middle of the board. Add some toilet paper roll “cat tails” for a 3D effect + some pastel polka dot or striped bulletin board boarder for that finishing touch.

Click on the link to view/download Dr. Seuss Lucky Ducky Packet.

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"Today you are you; that is truer than true, there is no one else that is youer than you." -Dr. Seuss

1-2-3 Come Do Some More Cat In The Hat Activities With Me

I love the hat that Dr. Seuss created for his cat.  It's the perfect vehicle for all sorts of interesting activities.  I've designed a few more for today's article that cover a variety of standards.  I hope you enjoy them. 

I've had a few requests for more place value items, so I designed the Cat Hat Place Value Mat activity.  After running off the hat template, you can make it more durable and add some red to the hat,  by gluing it on a sheet of red construction paper, then trim and laminate.

Run off the number tiles on Seuss colors like red, yellow and turquoise.  Each number needs its own color.  Laminate and trim. 

I would do this as a whole group activity, so every student needs 10 of each of the 3 kinds of number tiles.   Store the set of 30 tiles in a Ziplock snack Baggie and make a class set.  By having 10 of each in the Baggie, you’ll have extras incase students lose one.

Have students take turns calling out 3-digit numbers.  Using a dry erase marker, children write that number on the hat brim and then put the correct number of tiles in the appropriate columns.  This is a quick, easy and fun way to whole group assess.

The packet also includes a certificate of praise.  Click on the link to view/download the Cat Hat Place Value Mat

For more math fun with the cat's hat, I designed a How many ways can you show a number, Popsicle stick activity.  There are several ways to use the Seuss Hat for different number games. 

Students can put the "How many ways can I show the number ______." hat brim strip, on their hat and then place all of the Popsicle stick equations, that make that number, on their Seuss hat.

Children place the Popsicle sticks on the hat in such a way, that they look like an ABAB striped pattern.

Students can show addition and subtraction as pictured, or to expedite things, just addition OR subtraction equations.

This is an easy and fun way to whole group assess a variety of concepts. 

I've included number tiles from 0-120 with a blank sheet for you to program with even higher numbers.  I've also included pages so students can work on fact families.

Besides using the hat for math, I made a few hat activities for language arts.  The Cat Hat AT family slider, is a fun way for students to see the various AT family words that they can make by pulling on the "slider."   Click on the link to view/download the Cat Hat AT slider craftivity.

I will read... is a hat bookmark that can be used as a writing prompt.  Share my example with your students and challenge them to write verses of their own. 

I've alluded to a variety of Seuss books in my poem. "I will read with Mr. Brown; I will read upside down.  I will read with duck feet; I will read because it's neat."

Challenge your students to figure out which books I've used.   Click on the link to view/download the I Can Read Dr. Seuss bookmark-writing prompt.

After reading The Cat in the Hat, review story elements with this Cat in the Hat language arts packet.

The packet includes pocket cards, a beginning-middle-end graphic organzizer, plus sentence strips to sequence the story. 

Students arrange the sentences in the correct order and glue them to their hat. 

Click on the link to view/download the Cat in the Hat story elements packet. 

Finally, because the punctuation pocket cards have been so popular, I decided to tweak this idea, and make the "cards" into stripes for the cat's hat. 

Run off the cat hat template on red construction paper. 

Run off the sentence strips on white copy paper.   Students underline the letters that need to be capitalized and add punctuation.  They cut their stripes and glue them to their hat in an ABAB pattern, leaving room so that the hat will look like it has alternating red and white stripes. 

If you want, have students re-write the corrected sentences on the red stripes.  So that each students' hat could be different, I made up 108 sentences from a variety of Dr. Seuss stories. 

Completed projects make a nice bulletin board.  A caption could be: "Hammer, slammer, whammer; ___________'s class really knows their grammar!"  Click on the link to view/download the Cat's Hat Grammar "craftivity" packet.

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"I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells." -Dr. Seuss