Fun Ideas for Read Across America

Read Across America began as a celebration of Dr. Seuss, but if you want to go beyond Seuss in your celebrations, or you have older kids who aren’t into his books anymore, there are lots of things you can do.

Diary of a Not So Wimpy Teacher has a full week of free activities planned, including a STEM day, rock day, pajama day, tourist day and doughnut day. Kids could dress up for some of these, and they include a book (and a list of other books) to read as a class and other activities related to the theme. So fun!

Check out Your Thrifty Co-Teacher’s ideas for Read Across America in upper elementary that include things like reading buddies, book tastings (we’ll get back to that one in a minute), designing your own book jackets and more.

Erin Waters EDU has some more good ideas like exploring different genres of books, having a book fair by unique trait (such as books all by women or people of color or who write stories about aliens) or setting up a literary scavenger hunt.

There are lots more great ideas at Buzzing with Ms. B. I love the idea of having kids make bookmarks or doing a March Madness style bracket (or even just voting) to discover the kids’ favorite book. You could ask each child for their (one of several) favorite book they read last year, or use books you’ve read in the classroom.

Draw your own or grab one from Novel Effect.

And I mentioned book tastings above, which I know I’ve talked about before, but also check out this post from I Love First Grade about doing a “reading restaurant” that is a little bit the opposite of the way I’ve seen it done before because here the kids are “reserving” the kinds of books they’d like to read and the teacher picks out some books for them to sample, rather than having the kids report on a book. But either way would be fun.

Do you do anything special for Read Across America? I’d love to hear about it.

[Photo via Your Thrifty Co-Teacher]

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Celebrate Reading with Read Across America Day

Most kids go through a phase where they want to learn more about animals, and it’s fun for them to learn about the diversity of the natural world and what humans can do to protect other creatures we share the planet with. Camilla de la Bedoyere has written a couple of books, illustrated by Philip Giordano, to help kids learn more about birds and bees.

Wild Your World: Birds looks at many different kinds of birds that live around the world and covers things like parts of a bird, different habitats that birds live in, migration, camouflage, what and how birds eat and more.

With lovely illustrations showing a diverse array of birds found around the world, the book talks about different birds that live in the woodlands, rainforest, fields and farms, coastland, grasslands and deserts, urban areas and the polar regions.

It talks about some of the biggest, smallest and fastest birds, and fun facts about different birds. For example you’ll learn about birds that next in cacti, the birds with weird shaped eggs so they won’t roll off cliffs, and meet the birds that migrate from New Zealand to Alaska.

Wild Your World: Bees follows a similar format, talking about different kinds of bees (and how the vast majority of bee species are solitary bees), parts of a bee and why bees look the way they do, how bees collect nectar and pollen, how bees sense the world around them, how their wings work and what life in a colony is like.

It covers the bee life cycle, how bees make honey, what causes a swarm and more. It covers digger bees, carpenter bees, orchid bees, cuckoo bees (who lay their eggs in the nests of teddy bear bees so they don’t have to take care of their young), mining bees, plasterer bees, leaf-cutter, wool carder and mason bees (so named because they collect materials to make their nests), bumblebees and swaet bees.

Readers will also learn about keeping bees. Both books talk about the dangers to birds and bees and what humans can do to help them.

These books are aimed at readers ages 4-9 who will enjoy looking at the pictures and learning about these animals and how people can help protect them.

About the books: Both books are 46 pages and hardcover. Published 2025 by Design Eye (see: birds|bees). Both books retail for $16.99.

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