The Pinspired Teacher: Celebrating Seuss Part 2: Hanging Inspirational Quotes

As Dr. Seuss' birthday nears, I wanted to share a quick activity that you can do with your students that will inspire your students the rest of the year! This was something I was "Pinspired" to do when I saw a fabulous list of famous quotes by Dr. Seuss which you can find here.

We turned some of the most popular quotes by Dr. Seuss into posters around the room.

I typed the quotes on a one page document, printed the page then cut the quotes into strips of paper. While explaining the activity, I read each quote aloud. As I was reading, some students connected so much to the quote that they raised their hand to choose that one. If no one else particularly wanted the quote, then I let them have it. One example of this was the quote "A person is a person no matter how small." My shortest student really connected to that quote (pictured above) and you could see the quote gave her a confidence boost. I placed the remaining quotes in a basket and had students pull quotes out of a basket to publish into posters. I had more quotes than students so I let each student pick 2 and choose the one they connected with most. We talked about what "quotes" were, and I was surprised that it turned out to be a much longer discussion than I would've thought.

Being departmentalized cuts down on the amount of craftivities I can do with my class, so I had to choose materials that would get the job done quick and easy with very little clean up. Hobby Lobby sells small strips of scrapbook paper in a variety of colors and patterns, I chose to use those as borders for the inspirational quote posters. They fit perfectly on plain white paper. The students were able to pick out what strips they wanted and glued them on first. With the remaining space they wrote their Dr. Seuss quote in pencil then traced it with marker. I laminated them to make them durable. To hang them from the ceiling, I hole punched the top and used string and paper clips on each end of the string. They would also look great on a bulletin board.

Now if my students are daydreaming, at least they will have inspirational quotes to read and encourage them as they stare into space. Ha!

This makes a great inferring lesson, because some of the quotes have a deeper meaning that students truly have to think about in order to understand. I made sure to ask the student's for their interpretation of the quote they chose. One of my girl's had the quote, "Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened." She didn't understand what Dr. Seuss meant by that, so I explained it to her. Later that day I could tell she understood because her eyes started to swell up with tears as she reminisced about her hamster that had recently passed away. She said her quote helped her to not be so sad about her hamster dying, because she had so many memories of her hamster doing funny things.