Oh, the thinks you can think when you are a homeschooler celebrating National Reading Month! Every month we try to read at least one new book, but this month we have another excuse to really go all out with reading! It is National Reading Month!
I’m getting my kiddos excited about National Reading Month by kicking things off with Dr. Seuss Day on March 2. That is Dr. Seuss’s (Theodor Seuss Geisel) birthday, and the perfect day to highlight the amazing bibliography of this celebrated author. It’s also the ideal way to emphasize the importance of reading and literature—as well as to recognize the most important fact of all: reading is fun!
As I’m planning my homeschool schedule for that day, I hope to include one or more of the following Dr. Seuss reading activities in my agenda. Oh, the places we’ll go by incorporating an extra dose of word play and imagination into our curricula on this special day of commemoration!
1. What Pet Should I Get?
No one made rhyming more fun and more attainable than Dr. Seuss. Practicing rhymes builds skills in phonemic awareness. On Dr. Seuss Day, I’ll try to turn our regular homeschool schedule on its ear by requiring that every time my child wants to ask a question, they must make it rhyme.
Do they want to know where their math book is? Then perhaps they will ask, “I don’t know if I left it in the bath, but can you help me find my book of math?” Do they want to know what is for lunch? Then maybe they will inquire, “I don’t even have a hunch so can you tell me what’s for lunch?”
2. Green Eggs and Ham
What is better than combining everyone’s favorite breakfast item with an opportunity to build STEM skills? I’d like to combine this physical science experiment with a reading of the book that made Sam I Am so very famous. And after my homeschooler observes whether eggs float better in saltwater or freshwater, it’s a good bet that we’ll scramble them with a side of ham for a midday snack!
3. I Can Read with My Eyes Shut
One of the National Reading Month activities that many schools host is a read-a-thon. Usually, each grade will give students a goal of a specific number of books that they will aim to read in a limited time frame. Why do schools get all the fun, though? I’ve decided there is no reason we can’t celebrate Dr. Seuss Day by setting our own homeschool goals. Maybe for my older homeschooler the goal will be to read a full chapter book in that day.
I would imagine that younger homeschoolers might be able to complete 2-3 picture books in a single day. Whatever the goal, the skill that students build with challenges like this one is reading fluency—a key milestone toward reading success.
4. Dr. Seuss’s ABC
Preschoolers shouldn’t be left out of Dr. Seuss Day—after all, “a person’s a person…no matter how small!” Every preschooler loves a scavenger hunt, so on this particular day, why not scavenge for letters? How fun would it be to go on a hunt through the house to try to find all 26 letters?
There are so many unique places where letters reside: on food items, on appliance labels, in photos, on the remote control, even on the bottoms of our shoes! My guess is that this will be one of those preschool reading activities that a pre-reader will ask to do again and again.
5. The Foot Book
Until now, I hadn’t considered The Foot Book as a tool to strengthen math for homeschoolers, so I’m trying to reassess. With all those left feet, right feet, feet, feet, feet, there are plenty of opportunities to build both reading and number sense with this enjoyable Dr. Seuss classic. Math concepts we will address using the text of this book include:
- Differentiating between left and right
- Measurement (how high would “over the chair” feet be, exactly??)
- Addition and subtraction (comparing difference in feet of caterpillars vs cows, etc.)
- Charts and graphs (graphing the different size feet of each member of your family)
As Dr. Seuss’s birthday nears, I’m excited to have a chance to dedicate a whole day to the joy of reading. As he would say, “If you never did you should. These things are fun and fun is good.”
