STEAM Plus Friends Equals Fun!

Over two days last week we celebrated some of our favorite Dr. Seuss books with different STEAM activities and a shared reading get-together with our Chapel Buddies. Some of the highlights were drawing crazy animal pictures and making a flip book of more creatures Gerald McGrew might have had if he ran the zoo and using many different building materials to engineer special places we’d like to visit after reading, “Oh the Places You’ll Go. We didn’t want to leave out mathematical thinking and problem-solving skills, so we used pattern blocks to create a multi-colored fish that showed how blocks fit together to fill a given space. We practiced counting by twos, fours, and hundreds and used visual discrimination after reading “The Foot Book.” We made paper plate turtles and stacked and counted them after we read “Yertle the Turtle.” We also talked about the many grown-up themes of some of his books, namely, the importance of individual rights, caring for the environment, and embracing diversity.

The relationship between first graders and their seventh grade Chapel Buddies made it possible to have an awesome shared reading experience. The first graders were proud to do lots of the reading and the seventh graders got to relive some of their own previous journeys into all those tongue-twisting rhyme stories. It was an awesome celebration of “Read Across America” for sure.

By: Pam Cook, 1st grade