All Info About Reading

 Have you been to the Jungle of Nool lately?  Horton the Elephant is alive and well and fascinating a whole new generation of young children, thanks to the feature-length animated film making the rounds of theaters in spring of 2008.  You can tap into this excitement whenever your child falls in love with Horton and use it to motivate reading and related activities.  Try some of these on for size:

Fill In Missing Words

Try reading this book aloud and leave off the final ending rhyming word on a page.  See if your young listeners can fill in the missing rhyme, or try to create your own rhyme that’s different from the original.  It’s a great way for younger readers to learn more about rhyming and phonemic awareness.  Older readers may enjoy creating a whole new story by replacing the rhyming words.  Let your creativity reign!

Do Some Choral Reading

Rhyming books like this one make great fodder for choral reading.  Divide the text into sections so that one group can read and the other group can respond with a few more lines.  Choral reading has been proven to improve fluency even for struggling readers, and is a wonderful tool for fun, too!

Vocabulary Exercises

There are some wonderful new words to learn from Horton.  Check out these winners:  despair, shirker, speck, racket, hullabaloo, vigor, vim, mauled, bellowing, plucked, and keen.  Find out what they mean, use them in sentences, have Word of the Day puzzles, and take a treasure hunt through the book to see where the words have come from.

Put on a Play

Hollywood is not the only group that can get dramatic!  Put on a play of your own about Horton.  You can trace and color illustrations from the book, cut them out and glue onto popsicle sticks to make stick or finger puppets, then act out the different parts.

Do a Dramatic Reading

Enlist different readers for the various speaking parts and the part of the narrator.  You may need a copy of the text with highlighting for each reader.  Have everyone say their pieces in turn, using an appropriate voice.

Make Another Adventure for Horton

In your best Seussian style, continue on with the story.  What happened after the book ended?  Were the Whos safe and sound forever more?  What other adventures did Horton have with them? 

Create a Horton Hears A Who Board Game

Use a file folder and draw a board game path around the inside pages.  Divide the path up into spaces and make a few penalty and bonus spots that relate to the story.  Try playing the game, using old marker lids for pawns.

Read More About Horton

Horton starred in another book before this one: Horton Hatches the Egg.  Read this book together and compare and contrast the two.  Does Horton’s personality shine through the same way in both books?  Does he have similar or different problems?

Go on a Book Scavenger Hunt

Everyone choose a different page in the book and look for the following items:  a made-up word, a word with three syllables, a name, a number word, a word that has seven letters, a plural word, a word that ends with -ing, a word that ends with -ly, a word with four syllables, a color word, and a size word.  Whoever has the most of these items wins the game.

Make Up a Whoville Saga

We met several of the people in Whoville, and we meet even more of the townspeople in How the Grinch Stole Christmas.  Write a story of your own with Whos as main characters.

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Want to catch up with info about this cool movie?  Check out Peggy Smith’s review at Family Screen Scene: Horton Hears a Who!

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