Imagination is the Key

In thinking about the importance of NEA’s Read Across America Day, I am reminded of The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins by Theador Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss). As teachers, we all wear many hats, and sometimes we don’t realize how many hats we are wearing and the sheer scope of what we are trying to teach to our students. No matter what “hat” we are wearing or what subject we are teaching at the time, reading is the fundamental skill for our students’ success in that subject. Reading is the most basic of the 21st century skills our students need today to excel in “The School of Life” after graduation. This March, let’s allow Dr. Seuss to inspire us all to bring the kind of fun and imagination into our classrooms that he brings into his stories. After all, “the brains in our head” are so important; we need to make sure to have fun filling them with important information in school!


Dr. Seuss was passionate about literacy. He created fanciful characters and imaginative stories to bring fun into reading for beginning and advanced readers alike. Reading Rockets, a national multimedia project for teaching kids to read, brings this passion for literacy and the love of reading to their programs and resources. Joann highlighted some of these resources this week in honor of Read Across America Day. They offer fun, cross-curricular activities that can be used to inspire readers in many different grades and subjects. The activities tie original and playful themes from Dr. Seuss’s books to important subjects our students are learning in class every day.

If you browse through the Reading Rockets site linked in Joann’s post, you will probably find a valuable Read Across America resource you can implement into your class to do your part to encourage the importance of literacy. In fact, you will most likely find lots activities you like. The hard part is choosing which one to use! There are numerous ideas for primary students. There are lessons to learn about phonics, rhyming, themes, and idea development in writing, to name a few. These activities are presented in fun, hands-on ways that can be very memorable for students. Reading Rockets also has a link to the AdLit site, which has a section with creative activities to engage secondary students. After all, nobody is too old for Dr. Seuss, right? Some of the secondary activities studied Dr. Seuss’s political and environmental views as portrayed in his stories, comparing his work to other authors, and using his themes for original student work.

What happens when we try to bring this focus on reading out of the English classroom? Can we successfully use books by Dr. Seuss in science, social studies, art or physical education? With the resources I looked at on the Reading Rockets site and by searching for “Seuss” on the main Gateway page, I say we can! We can all have fun using a little imagination and unconventional ideas in our classrooms. Here is just a beginning list of some of the activities I found in a search of The Gateway’s materials. There are too many resources to list here; I just wanted to give you a taste of what is out there. Search for yourself, and see!

In Social Studies, you can use The Sneetches to draw students into a lesson on diversity. You can create a mock trial in your classroom based on ideas from Yertle the Turtle. Community building and team work can be stressed in the story of Horton Hears a Who.

Science classes focusing on environmental issues and biodiversity can learn a lot by reading The Lorax. Science students of all levels seem to love making and playing with oobleck, a substance inspired by the book Bartholomew and the Oobleck. (Search oobleck on The Gateway for some recipes-don’t worry it’s easy to make, and I have had fun making it with kids from preschool to high school!)

For schools that are creating school-wide celebrations for Read Across America, or for P.E. teachers who want to tie into the theme in their own classes, there is a plan for an entire field day event based on Dr. Seuss books. On this topic, if any of you are P.E. teachers or know P.E. teachers, let them know about The Gateway, too. I have come across lots of great physical activities that could bring a little extra variety into these lessons, too.

The activities for secondary students went a lot more in-depth into the themes Dr. Seuss created. One involves writing an op-ed piece trying to convince someone to try a new, strange food ala Green Eggs and Ham. Another focuses on psychoanalytic criticism introduced in the book The Cat and the Hat (and we thought it was a book just for kids!) The Butter Battle Book can serve as a whimsical foray into the use of satire in writing.

If your students are like many others, the way to their heart is food! There are plenty of ideas for bringing food into the celebration. It can be as basic as serving goldfish while you read One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish to your class. Students can decorate cupcakes to celebrate the birthday of Dr. Seuss. Maybe you can even whip up a batch of green eggs and ham (yum!). It can also be really fun to have students look through the books and find a food they would like to recreate. They can do this for homework and bring it in to share with the class.

Read Across America is a day is to celebrate reading, but the focus on reading and the imagination it can create will easily spread into all subject areas. As I searched The Gateway for the vast resources available on the subject, I realized that Dr. Seuss can still teach us just about anything! Let’s all try to incorporate this theme somewhere in our classrooms this week to spark some imaginations and put the FUN back in reading.

~Peggy's Corner~

Explore http://thegateway.org/ for more resources.

Read Across America

March 2, 2010 marks the 12th year of Read Across America, the innovative reading awareness program created by the National Education Association. Schools, libraries, community centers, and other organizations celebrate the day by hosting events that promote children’s reading. March 2 was chosen as the annual date as a way to honor beloved children’s author Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. At our local schools, students (and many teachers) dress up, don striped Cat in the Hat head gear, listen to visiting authors, hold readers’ theaters, and otherwise fete the sheer joy of reading. Reading Rockets, whose resources are featured this week, is a national multimedia project offering information and resources on how young kids learn to read, why so many kids struggle with reading, and how parents and teachers can help. The project is an educational initiative of WETA, the leading public radio and television station in Washington, DC. Reading Rockets is a national partner of the Read Across America project.


Read Across America Resources
http://www.thegateway.org/browse/dcrecord.2010-02-12.6758088739
Subjects: Reading, English, Language Arts
Grade: Preschool – 4th grade

This collection of resources offers plenty of activities and ideas to help celebrate the pleasure of reading on Read Across America Day (and every other day of the year, too). There are classroom strategies to incorporate Dr. Seuss books into literacy-building activities; e-cards; bookmarks in English and Spanish; videos of the Hooray for Diffendoofer Day authors who were inspired by Dr. Seuss; a video interview with Theodore Geisel's wife, Audrey; and activities to celebrate Dr. Seuss at home.


Family Literacy Bag: Where the Wild Things Are
http://www.thegateway.org/browse/dcrecord.2010-02-18.3590056362
Subjects: Reading, English, Language Arts
Grade: K-1

This kit allows teachers to create a take-home "literacy bag" so that parents can read and engage with their children. The topic of this particular kit is Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, and features the classic children’s tale. The kit also contains lists of nonfiction titles about nighttime and fiction titles that emphasize concepts such as dealing with feelings and using your imagination. I like that the kit’s activities and suggested companion book selections are so well-thought-out: combined, the titles completely capture the spirit of Max, his anger, creativity, and the mysteries of night. Nonfiction selections focus on night animals or how nightfall occurs, while the fiction selections offer tales of young children’s changing emotions and their endless capacity for imaginative play and creation. The kit (available in Spanish as well as in English) also contains various resources to encourage hands-on activities for kids and parents to share.

Beginning Readers: Look! I Can Read This!
http://www.thegateway.org/browse/dcrecord.2010-02-18.0527943194
Subjects: Reading, English, Language Arts
Grade: Pre-school-1st grade

This brief article provides information on emergent readers, and gives a few tips for parents on how to support their children’s early reading efforts in a positive way. The article describes some literacy-related traits of beginning readers, as well as how to read with a beginner. This article - available in Spanish, MS Word, and PDF formats - may be reproduced in newsletters prepared by preschools, elementary schools, or parent organizations.

~Joann's Picks~

Explore http://thegateway.org/ for more resources.

Using Themes in Teaching

It’s January and, for many of us, the weather outside is cold and dreary. Let’s keep that cold and dreary feeling out of your classroom, though! Why don’t you break the monotony this winter and try out some theme lessons or units to warm things up a little for your students? Take a look around you and try to think of things going on in the world that are interesting to your students.


You probably have a pretty good idea of what topics you need to cover for the next few weeks, months, or the rest of the year if you are really planning ahead! You know the standards you need to cover. You may even have lots of specific lessons and activities planned. Hopefully, you found some great resources on The Gateway to use this year.

It’s fun to be flexible with these plans and to adapt them to tie in with current events around the world, within your state or town, or even in your school. You can also tie lessons and units in with historical events and holidays. Lessons can even be matched up with other things that seem to capture your students’ attention, such as sporting events.

Your students might be more interested in talking about the football games going on during the week than learning about the important things you have to teach them. Maybe you can try to pique their interest by relating a week of your lessons and activities to an underlying theme in their lives (which during January might be football!) This can bring a new level of interest for you and your students.

I realize that I don’t know a whole lot about football. I definitely couldn’t teach the fundamentals of the sport! I do know that it’s a topic on many students’ minds right now, though. I can successfully use that to help my students be excited to learn what I am really trying to teach.

My search for the keyword “football” on The Gateway produced 41 results. If I am a math teacher, I can implement one of the activities that covers how to use and calculate football statistics. Your students would be using math skills they might even take home to teach their parents! If I am an English or Social Studies teacher, I can assign a positional papers or debate on a timely topic like football players’ inflating salaries. As a physics teacher, I can use football as a starting point for all kinds of lessons on projectiles, collisions, and more. I can even use a review activity that works a lot like a football game to review material for a big test in any subject. What a fun way to incorporate football into an ordinary day of school!

Look around in the news, on calendars, and around campus. There are ideas all around for themed lessons and units that will touch close to home for students. I like to use holidays (Especially some of the offbeat ones you hear on the radio!) My high school calculus teacher liked to celebrate Pi Day (3/14) with a big party. Everyone brought pies, and we learned about the significance of pi. I’ll always remember the poems and the fun that helped me remember that pi=3.14159…

January has a very important historical holiday, too. Martin Luther King Jr. Day can be a valuable topic to include in a history class or even an English class. Don’t be afraid to bring ideas from the civil rights movement into subjects that might not appear to be related at all. With a little creativity, you can relate the theme to a variety of seemingly unrelated subjects. You aren’t just teaching your class about an important part of history, you are using that event to help create lessons and units that are more cohesive and interesting.

The key here is that your time is precious, and your students’ learning time needs to be maximized. I am not suggesting that you spend an enormous amount of time creating original themed units for every season, holiday, and important current event. Use ideas from your colleagues, ideas you have come up with in the past, and ideas on The Gateway to 21st Century Skills.

Once you have a theme you want to try and you find resources you like, modify, modify, modify! There are some great ideas and resources here from trusted sources. You are the expert with your students, though…so make the lessons your own. When something works well, leave a comment so someone else can benefit. This is the kind of collaboration that will create change in our teaching!

It might make the content more fun for you to deliver, and definitely more fun and interesting for the students. After all, they won’t learn much if they are not interested enough to pay attention!

~Peggy's Corner~