Plan your event before you dive in head first!
Here’s a list of suggested preliminary steps to take before or as you begin your planning:
- Get your principal or superintendent’s approval to conduct an RCAA event.
- Check your school calendar and decide on a day to celebrate. Though Dr. Seuss’ birthday falls on March 2, you can schedule your event(s) on any day that is convenient for your school or organization. Remember: RCAA is a year-long celebration of better literacy through captioning!
- Read the NEA’s copyright and licensing arrangements regarding the use of content owned by Dr. Seuss Enterprises.
- Consult with your outreach staff, and encourage them to get other local schools involved.
- Inform other teachers about the event.
- Tell your students’ parents about the event.
- Gather support from local resources.
- Explore the Read Across America Web site fully.
- Get your Cat in the Hat hats and celebrate the big day!
Try some of these fun activities and ideas to make your event a success!
Once you’ve taken care of the preliminaries, why not add a splash of creativity to your RCAA event by building on some of the following suggested activities/resources:
- Invite a local author or celebrity to read from a book that a captioned media title is adapted from, or they may read from another book on a similar subject as the captioned media title that you are showing.
- Set up a round robin viewing, with students moving from classroom to classroom, watching different short captioned media titles at each stop.
- After viewing a captioned media title, have students write the next chapter to the story.
- Ask the children to name their favorite media titles. Tabulate the results and post the list.
- Create a bulletin board of teachers’ favorite media titles for the classroom.
- Have individual classes show off their creativity by designing their own bulletin boards featuring students’ favorite media titles.
- Have students fill out Dr. Seuss birthday cards with the name of a media title they watched and the book it was adapted from. Put the cards up around the school to recognize students for their participation and/or mail them to the DCMP. The DCMP will send a thank you letter.
- Invite a local captioning company [PDF] to come and demonstrate how media is captioned.
- Add to your library’s collection by requesting new and used books that are available free of charge to schools for participating in “Read Across America” and other literacy programs. One such program, LEFBooks (LEF stands for the Literacy Empowerment Foundation), has distributed over 40,000 books to U.S. schools.
- Try reading captions across America by the mile. Assign each media title a value in miles, and let the students accumulate miles to “travel” across the United States. Mark their progress on a big map. Or read captions across America by having students watch media titles of stories that take place in each of the 50 states or non-fiction titles that highlight states or regions.
- Ask your cafeteria manager to create a special meal (such as green eggs and ham) or an RCAA birthday cake that displays “Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss!” A large poster listing the foods and which stories they are from brings the students interest back to the books and media titles.
- Plan a week of zany dress-up days to celebrate your reading theme (Fox in Socks Day, Kid in a Hat Day, Grinch Green Day, etc.). Organize a costume parade including both staff and students.
- Ask administrators to do something wacky if students reach a particular viewing goal before the RCAA celebration. Some principals have eaten worms, jumped in frozen lakes, dyed their hair purple, or even kissed pigs!
- Print and use the Read Across America Event Kit [PDF] (The 2008 version of the Read Across America Event Kit as well as the 2006 version [PDF] is also available) from Seussville.
- Award RCAA participants with a certificate of appreciation [PDF] and prizes at the end of your celebration.
- Forward RCAA information and resources to other teachers and outreach personnel.
- Order the media you plan to use for your event well in advance! We’ve prepared a convenient list of DCMP that would be great additions to your RCAA event, but feel free to browse or search the DCMP catalog to create your own customized list.
- Update your bulletin board and Web site or blog with pictures of students and staff taking part in RCAA-related activities. Share these pictures on the Read Captions Across America Flickr group (if you’ don’t have a free Flickr account and don’t wish to sign up for one, you can e-mail your pictures to the DCMP and we’ll post them for you).
- Don’t forget to e-mail the DCMP at tlohman [at] dcmp [dot] org to pledge your event!.
- For more ideas on planning a RCAA event, see the NEA’s “Read Across America” Web site.