Seuss'ing it up!

We're coming up to Dr. Seuss Day and I wasn't really planning on participating too much. My students last year were a little "too cool for school" and would have DIED if I did anything with them that was Seussical. This year's crop of kids is still hanging on to being kids and a few have mentioned that they're excited about Dr. Seuss.  It just so happens we're covering alliteration this week which is PERFECT for Dr. Seuss!!

Below is the activity that I did with my students.
Prior knowledge coming in the lesson: alliteration, consonance, and assonance

Students were broken up into six groups of four and each group was given a Dr. Seuss book. I chose the ones shown in the picture because they're a little lesser known (for the most part) and would be "new" to most of the kids. Students read the stories together, all the while tracking examples of alliteration found in the book. Then we traded books! We repeated this until every group had read every book. (You could make this a multi-day lesson too if you wanted to focus on comprehension and all that other good stuff.)
We shared examples that we found as a class from each book and then put it under the correct type on our anchor chart using sticky notes.
The next part is the fun part. We play it a little like how Scategories works. Group 1 will slowly list off the alliterations they found and if any other group found the same one then everyone has to cross it off. For each one that remains on your list after you've gone through it you get one point. Then Team 2 goes. They should no longer have anything that overlaps with Team 1, but they go through their list to see if the other teams have the same alliterations. By the end, the team with the most alliterations remaining "wins". Doing it this way encourages students to dig a little deeper and not just take one obvious alliteration and say," We're done Mrs. J!"

Happy Seuss Day! Read! Read! Read!

Mrs. J

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