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Monday, March 3, 2008

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss


Well, his birthday was yesterday, but many of us who celebrated Read Across America had our cake today. Today culminated a month-long reading program at our school. We read Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss to all classes. To celebrate we had an assembly. I used image generators to create a slideshow for the event. You will see some of the images here.


We have school-wide read alouds for which we create a list of words called "Wow!" words. We have focused on these words as a school for the past month. After taking a picture of Seuss stuffed toys, I Warholized them and then added our Wow! words in the center. (Sorry I couldn't post it here, but I couldn't figure out how to copy just the one power point page.) During the assembly we read the words through. Then the students were told to look and listen for the words throughout the rest of the slideshow. Staff members from all parts of the building were photographed reading or holding favorite books. I then used Big Huge Labs to create speech bubbles. I gave each staff member a reading slogan, trying to incorporate Wow! words into the bubbles. Students raised their hands whenever they heard a Wow! word and then identified which word it was. It was powerful for us to see how students throughout the school had internalized the Wow! words.


I Warholized, captionized and rethought my presentation. The result was gratifying. These tools have been so useful already. I'm sure there will be plenty of ways to use them.

1 comment:

Cindi said...

Hope the event was a smashing success and that you maintained your sanity throughout (and had time to breathe once all was said and done).