Dr. Seuss' birthday seems to be something that is celebrated in a lot of schools these days. And it actually wasn't our planned extra holiday for March, but when I started seeing ideas come up I thought it could be fun to do a little Seuss themed morning. I actually put it all together on Friday morning while we ate breakfast and played. Cooper's favorite book of the moment is Cat in the Hat, so I thought he'd get a kick out of a few Seuss-themed activities.
I found a playlist on Spotify that has several of Dr. Seuss' books being read aloud (I also found a lot of them on Amazon music after I looked). So when I started the playlist it played Green Eggs and Ham and Cooper heard it and wanted to go get his books. So we gathered up all his Dr Seuss books and carried them to the living room. Then he dug through and found Green Eggs and Ham.
A lot of our morning looked like this-- Cooper sitting in my lap while I read books to him. He requested Fox in Socks several times, so I read it a few and then found a funny fast version on Amazon.
After Fox in Socks we moved on to Hop on Pop. This has been one of Cooper's favorites in the past and although he's now moved on to requesting Cat in the Hat more, he still remembers a lot of the words in Hop on Pop. So we read through it and then tried out a game to go with it.
I'd seen this idea to do Hop on Letters and decided to try it with colors. So I would tell him "hop on red" or "hop on green" and he'd find the color and hop on it. Cooper really isn't too in to colors, so I wasn't sure how well he'd do, but figured it would be fun to try. He actually surprised me and found every color I named.
He loved hopping on each of the colors! After a few rounds, I told him to pick the color and he'd hop on it and I'd ask him to name it. He did some of them and not others. Overall it was a pretty fun toddler game that required minimal prep (I grabbed different colors of construction paper from the office and laid them on the floor randomly!)
About 5 minutes before snack time I got on Pinterest to see if I could come up with a fun snack. I saw these hats for Cat in the Hat made with Strawberries and Bananas. We didn't have bananas, so I made some with string cheese and a couple with marshmallows. Cooper loved it.
And added bonus, it became fine motor practice taking the food off the toothpick and then he wanted to try to put some of the strawberries back on. Cat in the Hat was not on Amazon or Spotify, so I found a read aloud version on YouTube and we listened to that while he ate.
We finished the morning with a few Cat in the Hat activities. We started with this putting red and white pom poms in a Cup decorated like Cat's Hat. We didn't have Red disposable cups to cut a hole in, so I used a styrofoam cup and added stripes with a red Sharpie.
He also loved picking up the cup and seeing all of the pom poms underneath it.
The game lasted less than 5 minutes before he was over it and just wanted to wear the "hat." But he did just say "all done pom poms" and get up, our last several pom pom activities he would throw and dump them all over the floor, so this felt like a major win.
Since Cooper had had so much fun with snowman bowling with Styrofoam cups last month, I decided to add in some Cat in the Hat bowling. So we had 3 white cups decorated with sharpie and 2 red plastic cups I added masking tape to.
He loved it! He practiced throwing, kicking, and rolling his ball to knock the cups down.
And then he tried stacking them all back up in different forms and seemed to like them all in one big stack to knock over.
Overall, it was a fun morning trying a few themed activities. The Dr Seuss books really are so fun and I love that he's been getting more into them lately.
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