Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss - March 2

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss - March 2

My anticipation for Dr. Seuss's birthday is at an all-time high.  On March 2nd, children's books and the act of reading to children is viewed as a cause for celebration. Schools, communities, and retailers (Target has activities planned for Feb. 25) plan events and activities to allow children and families to have fun with some of most beloved children's books of all time. Adding to the excitement this year is the release of The Lorax movie which conveniently opens on March 2nd. Normally, I elect to publish my posts the night before the author's birthday. However, this year I couldn't wait to share our celebration and I wanted to give all of you a chance to share your ideas by linking up at the end of this post.

My excitement is most evidenced by the fact that I planned ahead enough to get my hands on a few Dr. Seuss books at my local library a couple of weeks ago. They tend to get snatched up around this time each year by enthusiastic Seuss fans! My choices were  The Butter Battle Book, Daisy-Head Mayzie, and Scrambled Eggs Super.  Of the three books, we had never read Scrambled Eggs Super and it became the focus of this year's birthday celebration for Dr. Seuss.  In this book, Peter T. Hooper is bored with plain ol' scrambled eggs and decides to hunt for eggs from birds of all shapes and sizes to try to improve this simple breakfast meal.

In the book, Peter T. Hooper introduces us to birds like the Ruffle-Necked Sala-ma-goox, the Mop-Noodled Finch, and the Long-Legger Kwong. To create some of our own birds we thought we needed to start with a creative name.  To do this, I came up with the idea of making a Bird-Name-Generator.  Once the generator was complete it was comprised of three piles of cards.

We started by making the last pile. On small strips of paper, we wrote the names common birds in our area -- cardinal, sparrow, hawk, duck, woodpecker. My children used a bird field guide to find the names.  As we were compiling the bird names we took notice of descriptive words that were in the full name of many of the birds like breasted (White-breasted Nuthatch), throated (Ruby-throated Hummingbird), and bellied (Red-Bellied Woodpecker).  These words made up our middle pile.  Lastly, we made our first pile of cards. This pile was made up of words that we found to be silly, like spritz or snapple-bapple or favorites from Scrambled Eggs Super like beagle and ruffle!

We stacked the cards into the three piles and placed them face down.  Then, we picked one card from each stack to generate our bird name.  We came up with names like the Spritz-tailed Wren, Whammer-Hooded Starling, and Frizzle-bellied Hawk.  With each pull of the cards my children were laughing out loud!

We paused for a little breakfast of scrambled eggs!

Then, it was time to design the eggs for each bird name.  We had tons of plastic Easter eggs in our house.  We decorated the eggs with designs and patterns by using Sharpie Markers.  

A proud egg designer. 

The next step involved cataloging our eggs.  First, I wrote the name of the bird on top of a piece of scrap paper.  Then, drew a thumbnail sized picture of the bird's egg that the kids created in the bottom corner.  Then, my children drew a picture of the bird.

Here are a few of my son's creations -- the Snapple-Dee-Nanner-winged Bluebird, the Spritz-tailed Wren, and the Beagle-footed Turkey.

They were so excited about making the eggs that we ended up with 18 different eggs. Pictured here are 5 from my daughter and 3 that I designed.  My son did 10 by himself!

This was my daughter's favorite creation -- the Kicka-horned Dove.  Notice that the bird is kicking and it is calling "Kick-you, kick-you". 

The last part of the activity was to have an egg hunt.  We hid the eggs all over the house.  The finder of the eggs had the bird information sheets we made to help them identify the bird egg when they found it.

I would love hear about your ideas of how to celebrate Dr. Seuss's birthday.  The linky list for this post has expired, but a new list was created.  Click Here to link up your activities!