Dr. Seuss celebration to promote reading at Brewster Elementary School

Right around the time of Dr. Seuss's birthday, everyone in the kindergarten through fifth grades at Brewster Elementary School, every single kid at school, took part of the school day to read and have fun reading.

Dr. Seuss's birthday is the first week of March and it's become an occasion to promote reading nationwide; at Brewster they've done some tweaking to the "Read Across America" idea, calling it "Read Across Brewster Elementary School." And that's what everybody does sometime during the day.

Kids, teachers and aides were encouraged to come to school dressed up as their favorite Dr. Seuss character, and classes chose different Dr. Seuss books as the basis for fun activities. (The Cat in the Hat and Thing 1 and Thing 2 were in the HOSTS room all day.) Third graders read Oh, the Places You'll Go and made paper suitcases listing some of the places they'd go if they could. Some first graders made hats after reading The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. Another first grade class read One Fish, Two Fish and made graphs showing some of things they learned about numbers.

Fourth and fifth graders got together down in the multipurpose room and wrote their own story, illustrated on the spot by local artist (and AmeriCorps volunteer at school) Frank DeLeon. At 2:30 p.m. everybody in the grade school stopped what they were doing and read a book.

Every student at school was given a book for their very own, courtesy of the "Page Ahead" grant. Children who dressed up as their favorite Dr. Seuss character were entered in a drawing for prizes, including Cat in the Hat hats, gift certificates for Subway or new books.