Bookworms Book Club - Green Eggs and Ham!

The Bookworms Book Club just celebrated its one-year anniversary! This book club for Kindergartners through 2nd graders has been such a fun and rewarding program, and I just can't say enough how much I love these little kids!

We celebrated Dr. Seuss' birthday this month with my FAVORITE Seuss book: Green Eggs and Ham!

Of course, we needed snacks.  Like green eggs:

(sugar cookies, frosted white, with a green Mega M&M)

And rainbow Goldfish crackers, because why not?

We also needed awesome eggy nametags:

(These were just drawn free-hand.  I had teen volunteers help me cut out the pieces and I glued them together.)

We always sit and read the book together at the beginning of the meeting.  I think Green Eggs is fun to try to read really really fast, and they thoroughly enjoyed my getting completely tongue-tied several times!

On to the games! I cut out printouts of a bunch of Seuss characters from various books, and pinned the books' titles to our bulletin board.  The kids had to place the characters up on the board with their proper titles.  Some were easy like The Cat in the Hat and Sam-I-Am, while others were less known, such a Thidwick, the Big-Hearted Moose and the Zizzer Zazzer Zuzz from Dr. Seuss' ABC.  They did a great job and helped each other when they weren't sure!

"What's that giant green ham for?", you ask! Why, it's the Seuss version of "pin the tail on the donkey!"  The kids used their egg nametags (with a piece of tape on the back), and "pinned" them to the board.  As a blindfold, I borrowed a big red Sam-I-Am hat from a coworker, and it fit perfectly over the kid's faces.  Even without being able to see, they did a pretty good job!  They had a blast with this and wanted to try it over and over to get their egg closer to the ham!

(This was just drawn free-hand on green paper, and glued on to the "tray," which is white paper, colored gray. This idea came from Seussville.)

We always finish with a craft, and this month they made a set of Dr. Seuss "Memory" cards to play at home.  "Memory" (or "Concentration") is just a simple game where you flip cards over, two at a time, until you find a match.  If your two cards match, you keep them, but if they do not match, you have to flip them back over.  I made these cards myself and printed them on cardstock.  The kids cut them out, and decorated little cardboard boxes (they look like Chinese takeout boxes) to keep them in (We just happened to have these so I used them!).  We had Dr. Seuss stickers and markers to decorate with.  

I searched high and low for a Green Eggs and Ham craft and never found anything I liked for this age group, so I ended up coming up with this myself.  I think the kids enjoyed making it and I like the idea that they went home with a new game to play.

This monthly program is always a blast, and really gets kids excited about reading!  I had 8 attendees this month (this is average), which is a very manageable size.  We had a lot of fun celebrating Dr. Seuss and can't wait until our next meeting! 

Next month we are reading Fancy Nancy Sees Stars by Jane O'Connor.  See you then!