Read Across America: Celebrating with Guest Readers!

Everybody wants our kids to be readers. Like, everybody in the world- it's important to people other than us! Sometimes it doesn't feel that way, like when you're giving another state required test, or when you're having to defend your independent reading time (I've heard this happens). But people in the community actually want our kids to read. So why not capitalize on that?

 

 

This year, we invited retired teachers, preservice teachers, and community members to come read aloud to our kids throughout our Read Across America week-long celebration! 

First, we set up our reading lounge (a brand-new school initiative: a comfy place for classes to read!) with cute Seuss stuff. Our librarian found a volunteer to put up some Seuss decorations. She also arranged some hospitality like cookies, snacks, and coffee for our guests.

 

This room served as our "green room" for readers!

 

  

 Our librarian also set up a table full of book selections for our readers. She chose a variety of books and created baskets: English titles, Spanish titles (we live in a bilingual community), and Seuss titles. Honestly, not everyone can read Seuss aloud - he's quite a challenge - so she likes to have all types of books for readers to choose from!

 

 In the month before our celebration, our librarian ceaselessly contacts people from our community. This year, for retired teachers, she called the retired teacher association. For preservice teachers, she spoke to the dean of education from our university. And for community members, she called every news station, law enforcement agency, and any other individual she could reach through word of mouth!

 Some of our friends served as beautiful guest readers. My husband, a videographer/photographer, our dear friend, a counselor,

another of our friends, the constable,

 

 and my friend the public librarian all came to read aloud to our kids. 

The mascot, Chico, from our local minor league baseball team, the El Paso Chihuahuas, also came to read aloud to our kids! He brought his buddy and they read a cute book adapted from Curious George Goes to the Ballpark. The kids could not stop laughing.

We also hosted Rick Cabrera, a newscaster, and Mark Negrete, an author.

Overall, I think we had about 30 retired teachers, 20 preservice teachers, and over 35 community members. That's incredible! Our librarian is the best!

Each reader left with a small token of our appreciation: a notepad, pencil, pen, and pin, all tied up with adorable Seuss ribbon we found at Wal-Mart.

This is my hunnybun reading aloud - clearly with lots of expression - to a third grade class. He chose to read The Day the Crayons Quit because when he read it, he couldn't stop cracking up! He (and the kids) especially liked the page where the peach crayon is naked. Because he has the sense of humor of an eight-year-old boy.

 Happy Seuss Week! Pin It

Read Across America Celebration: Fun Events All Week Long!

One of the most fun things about our Dr. Seuss celebration is that it lasts all week. On each day, we have special events to (hopefully) get our kids excited about reading! This year included some fun dress-up events to Seussify Yourself, and we also scheduled a fun Read Across Capistrano event!

 Monday: Seuss Yourself with Stripes!

 Easy peasy, right? I honestly wore the same striped sweater I wore last year!

On Monday, we also had guest readers schedule to visit classes all over the school. We specifically invited retired teachers to come and read to our kids! I'm posting about that soon!

 Tuesday: Lorax Mustache Day!

I must say, I kind of enjoyed having a mustache.

It made me feel important and, as my Harry Potter club kids said whilst stroking their mustaches, "You can express your emotions."

 On Tuesday, teachers switched classes and read to each others' kids!

 We also did our big book giveaway on Tuesday! We had requested donated books from a local non-profit, Books Are Gems. They gave us one book for each child in our school! Kids received a book, bookmark, and pencil for free!

Wednesday: Snuggle Up with a Good Book Pajama Day and Read Across Capistrano!

 I seriously have crazy eyes in this picture. It was almost impossible to take a full-body selfie. I mean, really, why didn't I just ask someone to help me? Also, I accidentally stuck my watermark on there twice, once right over my face. Oh, well.

Anyway, it was pajama day. It was also READ ACROSS CAPISTRANO! (my school)

At 8:00, all classes in the school picked up their books and headed out into the hallway. The students, teachers, and staff read for thirty minutes! I had a blast!

Here I am, comfy in my pajamas, reading the last book I bought by Gregory Maguire. The. Best. Day. Ever.

 That afternoon, I gave an inservice to the teachers (it was an early release day.) To make the day extra special, my librarian buddy and I made these little teacher gifts! We had volunteer help!

 Each little canvas bag had a pin, pen, pencil, notepad, and bookmark, plus a little Seuss ribbon tied on!

It was a full house!

 

I also used these adorable reward scratch-offs my sister-in-law gave me for Christmas to reward some great kids and readers!

 

Friday: Crazy socks & shoes: Fox in Sox Day!

 On Friday, our biggest day, we wore our cute Seuss shirts!

We also wore crazy socks and shoes. We had guest readers from the community visiting that day and we didn't want to scare them off with too much weird stuff.

The next post will be all about our guest readers: who they are and what we do to prepare for them!

Here was our calendar of events:

  Happy Seuss Week!     Pin It

Seuss Snacks: Read Across America snacks!

By now, I thought I'd be all Seussed out, but I have just a tiny bit of energy left to blog about our crazy Read Across America celebration last week. Of course, I did take a bit of a breather on this fine Saturday. I rose early with good intentions, and after a delicious breakfast found myself watching episode after episode of Scandal while drinking massive amounts of hot orange spice tea. So that was a little less than productive.

But now I've parked myself at a Starbucks, I'm listening to Paul Simon, and I think I'm finally ready to write about this incredible week. Every year, we try to make our Seuss celebration bigger and better. I don't know which events will help provide students with a positive connection with reading, but more is better, right? We have to keep trying!

One way we keep kids excited about reading is by getting teachers excited! We're all so tested and burdened with paperwork, and we wanted to show how much we appreciate and love our teachers. So each day, in the lounge, we had a nice Seuss snack for our teachers! My librarian buddy and I make them and put them out; enough for each member of the staff & faculty to have one!

Monday: Cat in the Hat Cheese Sticks

These are surprisingly easy to make! Just buy some cheese sticks and use a black permanent marker and a red permanent marker. I made them at home and refrigerated them until our event - great for a do-in-advance treat!

I bought these red bins and a tablecloth at the Dollar Store. We used the truffula trees I made last year (find out how here) and the other props we'd made to decorate the table.

Easy peasy!

Tuesday: Truffula Seeds

These are another make-in-advance treat. I printed out the truffula seeds labels and stapled them to a plastic baggie. Then I filled the baggie with jelly beans!

We used our same display materials but added a Lorax and a copy of the book! A few gardening tools (for planting the seeds, of course) finished up our display.

Thursday: Chocolate Covered Pretzels & Oreos

These took a little longer! The Oreos below were the easiest part. We melted bowls full of red, white, and light blue melting chocolate discs. Then I drizzled it over a tray of Oreos. After they dried, I flipped them over and did the other side.

To make the pretzels, we bought pretzel rods and dipped them into the melted chocolate. Then we covered them with sprinkles. They were very similar to our marshmallow pops of last year.

 

We kind of made a mess in the lounge. It got much worse than this.

 

We made a few of these chocolate dipped Oreos (one of my most favorite things in the entire world.) I didn't have the right size sticks, though, so they kept breaking. I ate all the broken ones. There were five.

We put everything together with some cat in the hats!

Friday: Hop on Pop...corn!

I definitely recommend this one! We were fortunate enough that our secretary popped the popcorn for us in the big popcorn machine! Then a volunteer filled the cups with a cute polka-dotted napkin and popcorn. 

 

My hunnybun had already helped out by putting the labels on the cups, so they just had to be set up! What a nice team :)

Our week was full of Seussy snacks, and I know our teachers appreciated the special touch! I hope you use some of these ideas with your faculty or your students! If you're looking for more ideas, check out last year's Seuss snacks!

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Dr. Seuss Week is coming: Seuss-inspired bulletin boards!

If you're like my librarian buddy and I, you LOVE Dr. Seuss Week, also known as Read Across America. It's really just a great excuse to proclaim loudly and long how much we love to read! What can be better?!

So this year, we've started a TON of initiatives. We usually do that, by adding one on top of another until we're about to lose it and we don't think we can do one more thing. And then we're like, "...wait! What if we..." and we add one more thing. I keep expecting my principal to say, "Ladies, seriously. That's enough." But she hasn't said it yet, so we keep piling on the fun stuff!

This year, we started out with bulletin boards in preparation for Read Across America (which we are celebrating a week early by the way, so we don't have to beat up all the other literacy coaches and librarians to take their guest readers).

We downloaded an app called the Cat Cam in the app store on the iphone. It is hilarious. This is my Cat Cam photo:

We knew we wanted to take pictures of the faculty and use them to make a fun bulletin board, but to build some anticipation, I put up this partial board about three weeks before Read Across America.

The kids kept walking by, reading, "It's coming..." and speculating about what IT was!

Then we took pictures of all of the faculty using the Cat Cam app and made this fun bulletin board!

 

The words are too small to read in this picture, but on the left it says, "Celebrate Dr. Seuss Week, Feb. 23 - 27" (Yes, I know that's not the REAL week!) and on the right it says, "From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere!"

 

The kids LOVED it! They kept pointing out their teachers and giggling, especially when their teacher was Thing One!

Here's what I used to make the board:

- light blue fabric for the background

- red plastic tablecloths for the curtains

- blue painter's tape to make the "windowpanes"

- black butcher paper for the kids' silhouettes

- red butcher paper for the chairs

I projected the image of the original pin my librarian friend found of this bulletin board:

Original pin

 I taped some black butcher paper to the wall, and used a projector to project the image onto the black butcher paper and traced it. We cut them out. Then we did the same with the chairs on red paper.

I had stapled up the blue fabric on the board and the Dr. Seuss border my beautiful sister-in-law bought me for 80% off at an Office Depot going-out-of-business sale! We stapled up the silhouettes and the chairs and then I used the painter's tape to mark off the windowpanes, horizontally and vertically down the middle of the board.

I took the red tablecloths (we used two separate ones to make the two curtains) and I stapled the edge of one along the edge of the board. Then I stapled and scrunched all along to make the top look ruffled. I used some ribbon to tie them back like curtains.

We printed and cut out all of the Cat Cam pictures and I stapled them all up, adding the letters for the board last. Oh, and I stuck a cute paper banner I bought at Eraser Dust on top!

This is a different bulletin board I made last week, too.
 

We had all this adorable, brightly patterned fabric, so I thought, "Why not? Let's use it to make Seuss hills!"

 

I stapled the fabric...artistically? To make hills and valleys like in the book, "Oh, the Places You'll Go." Then I added another little layer in the back to look like far-away hills. The "balloons" are also made of fabric, and I stapled them around the edges and filled them with leftover fabric to make them puffy.

I recently had a realization that loofahs look like truffula trees. Well, used loofahs look more truffula-ish, but they're also disgusting, so I used some new loofahs to make our trees.

And I couldn't resist adding our school building.   What are your plans to celebrate Read Across America?   Pin It