Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss!

Everything about Friday, March 2, 2012 did not go as I had planned.  Besides being the amazing Dr. Seuss' birthday, it was also the birthday of my dear friend and fellow teacher, Mrs. Christi.  I wanted our pre-school day to be extra, extra special but alias, the real-world got in the way.  After days and days of planning and scheming (I spent days telling all our parents that we would be celebrating TWO birthdays on Friday), I left school on Thursday to head home and bake a birthday cake in the shape of the hat from A Cat in the Hat.  NOPE!  I came home to a refrigerator that was leaking water all over my kitchen.  So after mopping up my floor, finding the problem, deciding it wasn't worth the money to fix the thing, my hubby and I headed out to buy a new refrigerator!  By the time we got home, there was no time for baking.  Luckily, I called one of our moms (and dear, dear friend) and she volunteered to make our my cake!  THANKS TIFFANY!   I headed to bed that night thinking of the fun we would have on Friday.  Again, real life got in the way!  The great state of Alabama (and most of the southeast) woke up Friday to the news that we would be under a severe weather threat all day.  After what has happened to our state in the past 10 months, we in Alabama take severe weather VERY SERIOUSLY.  All the schools in our area made the decision to close early Friday. Our school would be closing at 12:00 noon but since most of the other schools closed at noon too, I knew our parents would pick up first.  RATS!  Sorry, Dr. Seuss!  I had to get moving to make this day a success!

We started our day by changing up our little carpool routine.  I helped Friday and told each child as they got out of the car that they could RUN down the hall to Mrs. Christi's room IF they told her "Happy Birthday"!  OH BOY!  Who doesn't want to run in school?  Christi said everyone ran in yelling "HAPPY BIRTHDAY!"  Many of the children brought her cards and gifts.  It was so fun to watch her face as more, more children came to school.  We talked about Dr. Seuss and sang "Happy Birthday" to him most of the morning.  Our art project was scaled back a bit because of our short day.  I still think it turned out well.

We headed to our kitchen for our Dr. Seuss One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish snack.  I found this printable and enlarged it.

 We loved counting our "fish" and placing them on the counting sheet.

And of course we enjoyed eating Mrs. Christi's birthday cake!

I really wanted to squeeze in our science experiment.  It came from the Dr. Seuss book, Bartholomew and the Oobleck .  WARNING this experiment is very messy!  I got MY recipe from Instructables , of course I didn't follow them EXACTLY (insert evil giggle here!)  Everyone had a lot of fun mixing and making a big mess!

Because our time was short we weren't able to do all activities but we ended our day with a new game.  We called it "HAT, HAT, CAT!"  You play it just like "DUCK, DUCK, GOOSE!" but change out the words!  Everyone and I do mean EVERYONE loved running and playing our new game.

All in all it was a short but great day.  I'm planning on doing a little tweaking to our calendar for next year.  I think we need an entire week to celebrate Dr. Seuss (and Mrs. Christi too)!  

Thanks for visiting us!  I hope you come back soon.  Next week we will be talking about the farm!