ToddlerBrain: Dr. Seuss

Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss!

In celebration of Dr. Seuss' Birthday and Read Across America, NHV and I are reading a Seuss book everyday this week. Along with each book, I've put together a quick toddler-friendly activity to share with you :)

Today we read "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish" ... or to be more accurate, we read just over half of this delightful but rather loooong book. We don't actually own this Seuss book; I picked it up at the library just for the occasion.

The text starts out rather simply with a predictable rhyme scheme but gets complicated with so many words having the same sound. However, we really enjoyed the illustrations and found lots of meaningful opportunities to count.

After reading (most of) the story, I put a page of fish in front of NHV and asked her to count them.

One fish, two fish, three fish, ...

Then I picked up a crayon and asked her, "What number is this fish?" She started out with 1, 2, 3, and then out of nowhere skipped to 16. Back to 4. And finally 20. I went with it because my goal was for her to say a number and then see it written. Mission accomplished.

The fish were printed on white paper, so we grabbed the crayons and colored each one a different color. I liked the repeated shape for this because it gave her a chance to kind of experiment with her method of coloring. Most of the fish were covered with a few circles of color but she also tried back-and-forth scribbles.

I also printed the same sheet of fish on three different colored papers ... red, blue, and yellow. We attempted a few patterns starting with alternating red-blue. NHV did fairly well with that one, so I upped the ante a little and tried yellow-yellow-blue-yellow ... as you can see in the photo, she was struggling and tired by this point ... we'll have to try that one again another day.

Here's my "sheet-of-fish" - you should be able to click to enlarge it and print ...