Green Eggs and Ham Dr. Seuss Activities

Do your children know the book Green Eggs and Ham? You can use these book extension activities to help them practice both reading and gross motor skills!

My kids love book extension activities that are simple and can be done again and again so the Green Eggs and Ham games I came up with were a big hit!  We played a Green Egg Relay game and made some Green Egg Word Chunk Spinners.

My preschoolers worked on developing their motor skills during the Green Egg Relay game.  I filled a plastic Easter egg with rice and the kids practiced carrying it across the room on a soup spoon.  When they got to the person on the other side they had to transfer it from their spoon to the other spoon.

Then we turned some of the rhyming words in the story into a word chunk game!  I wrote some of the word chunks that my 4 year old is practicing on the bottom of the plastic egg and consonants on the top half.  He could then spin the egg parts around to form and read new words.  These are great for entertaining kids in the car too!

 

A note from Megan:

I love that Dr. Seuss has inspired so many to read and am so thankful that I have had the opportunity to experience it first hand.  I had never really loved his book, There’s a Wocket in My Pocket!, until one of my high school students, who had struggled with reading his whole life, rapped it for the elementary school kids at their school celebration.

This big, cool high schooler spent days practicing and totally rocked his performance!  That day not only fostered a love of reading in the little kids who were attending, it made him and the other kids in my class love and value reading as well.  Needless to say There’s a Wocket in My Pocket! had a very special place in my heart.

But I have to say the more I’ve learned about Dr. Seuss the more complicated my feelings about his books became. His early racist ads are quite shocking if you haven’t seen them yet and as I have read more about him the more I realized the racist overtones of some of his books. I personally have made the decision to no longer write book activities for his books. As Oprah says, when we know better, we can do better and it no longer feels right for me.

We have a large collections of his books and I am not getting rid of them. But I will be teaching my kids more about his past including the racist parts. It’s important to know our history and the impact it’s had on others. And it’s important to me as a blogger to share things with you I would use in my own classroom or family.