Find the Sentence with Dr. Seuss

 I'm not unique in saying that Dr. Seuss is magical and amazing. I love that he write books full of nonsense words that rhyme with real words. I love that he has a sort of "moral to the story" in most (possibly all?) his books. And I love the crazy characters he creates.

 The Sneetches were not nice to people that were different them, eventually learning that we are all equal no matter what we look like - star or no star on our bellies. (And also, don't worry so much about following the latest fads and trends!)

"Ten on Top" is a fun counting book with a little competition between friends.

And for some just plain old silliness (that my boys adore!), "Wacky Wednesday" is a great pick to if you can carefully observe all the "wacky" things going on on each page.

Lucky for all of us who love the books he has written either as Dr. Seuss or his other pseudonym of  Theo LeSieg, they are relatively easy to find the at the thrift stores.So, you can inexpensively build your library.

I found this fantastic site last week called Playful Learning. I've been trying to get my boys to read more and feel like I have to sort of trick them into it. When I saw her idea for a "Story Puzzle," I decided it was a good technique I must try with the kiddos!

Basically, what you do is find a sentence in a book, write it down and your child looks for it as you are reading it. Instead of cutting them up like she did, I have just left mine as full sentences, making it more of a "hide and seek" than a puzzle. We might work up to that, we'll see. 

 Even though I knew it wasn't necessary to have the sentences on sentence strip paper, I thought that would be more fun and help the boys see the way letters will look when they practice them in school. (We just practice on regular paper right now, but I also got some pads of paper at the dollar store with the lines that I think we will use soon.)

  She suggested using books with just one sentence per page, but I thought that I would rather find a book that had simple sentences, even if there were a few per page. The first book I thought of was the one and only "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish" by Dr. Seuss. 

At first I wasn't sure how they would respond because a lot of times they protest when they think I am trying to teach them. I was very pleasantly surprised that not only did they like it, but they asked for more sentences!

So, I picked out a few out of another book and plan to do more. And really, I could just use only Dr. Seuss for it. The words he uses are usually good beginner reading words, but not always.

I would suggest skipping this one (and as a side note, can you quickly read this without making a single mistake?!)

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss!