Hi, I’m Gabby Barbera and welcome to my second blog post! It has come to the point in our Research Project where we must finalize our desired topic for the project. I tossed around many ideas but then came to a conclusion about young children. One thing they love to do is draw. Not only does it keep them occupied, but it gives them an outlet to be creative and explore their own imagination. I’ve found that Dr Seuss has particularly creative artwork in his children’s story books. My entire childhood I read Dr Seuss and have always loved his books, so I figured why not use one for a lesson plan! I’ve chosen The Cat in the Hat to base my lesson plan around and found it would be best for a Kindergarten to First Grade aged audience.

The Gardner’s multiple intelligences that I plan to engage upon are spatial, verbal and intrapersonal. In my lesson plan, I want to add features that ask students to respond creatively, whether that be by drawing something or working on rhyming words. This way, I can cater towards those who are visual (spatial) learners, by asking them to draw in response to the reading. This will give them the opportunity to really see what they are learning about. For verbal learners, I plan to work on rhyming skills, by discussing what words rhyme just like they do in Cat in the Hat. In order to cater my lesson plan towards intrapersonal learners, I will guide students to work with each other to rhyme words and use their mood to help guide what they rhyme and even what they draw.

My overall goal is that this lesson plan allows for a hands on activity as it can be difficult to keep a kindergartener sitting still and engaged. It is my intention to combine the rhyming and drawing aspects in a way that will be beneficial to the students. At this point in my project I am working on determining just how I will do so and plan to have this finalized by the next blog post. I find that these guide lines will work well with this text because it is a very colorful and fun book for children to read. They will most likely enjoy reading it and working on rhyming just like Dr Seuss did. Upon thinking about this lesson plan, I encountered a few problems along the way. I was concerned with what age levels this could apply to and how well I could turn it into a way to learn something. But, I think that by working on rhyming it could become very effective for the students.