Friday, March 2, 2012

Playdate Theme: Dr. Suess' Birthday

Dr. Suess Birthday (Read Across America) Playdate Theme:
Craft - Truffula Trees Craft , Plant "Truffula Tree" and Thing 1 and Thing 2 Handprint Craft
Books - The Lorax ; Mr. Brown Can Moo
Snack - Truffula Trees & Pink Ink Drink
Activity - Truffula Trees Dominos/Matching Game

Did you sign up for Read Across America to read The Lorax to your children or a group of children. It's not too late! You can still sign up! TODAY IS READ ACROSS AMERICA DAY! I have signed up to read to my son's little playdate and I also signed up to read to my daughter's kindergarten class. With both groups I will be reading The Lorax and planting Truffula Trees (aka tomato seeds - which this is the perfect time to grow those seedlings indoors.)

At our play date we are also planting these Truffula trees as well. The kids will have a chance to pick out the colors of their treetops (pompoms) and with a mom's assistance we will hot glue them to the top of a yellow pipe cleaners that I drew black lines on with permanent marker to look like the tree trunks in the book. Then we planted the trees in some homemade play-doh. You can find a couple of homemade play-doh recipes here.

 This is a picture of our Truffula Trees snack. I made cupcakes (used food coloring to make them green and put in green liners) and put green icing and sprinkles on top. To make the Truffula Tree Tops I quickly rolled a large marshmallow in water and then rolled it in colored sugar sprinkles, then I stuck large pretzel rods (broken to varying sizes) in the marshmallow in order to create a trunk. I will serve these with some Pink Ink Drink (aka Pink Lemonade.)

 We printed of 4 sets of the Truffula Dominoes so that each family would get a pack of 2 sets. I just didn't think that a set of 10 dominoes was enough, but a set of 20 sounded much better.

My daughter helped me with cutting them out and them placing them on the clear contact paper to laminate them. I like to laminate these kinds of things to make them easier to play with more than once & prevent tearing and water damage. Below is a set of 20 Truffula Tree Dominoes.

And presuming we have time for one more project, we will be making Thing 1 (2 or 3, depending upon where they are in birth order) hand print art projects.

To do the circle in the center, I used a large punch and wrote on them.

To do the body, just paint 4 fingers/thumb and do not paint the center finger.

Happy Birthday Dr. Suess!





4 comments:

Marnely Rodriguez-Murray said...

Love this! Makes me so happy and one of my favorite Dr. Seuss books is Oh The Places You'll Go!

Unknown said...

Too cute! Great ideas!

ginabad said...

I am really impressed with your Truffela trees, great job! Very inspiring, I must say.

Holly Hook said...

These all look like such fun ideas!