Fun Ideas for Read Across America – Lesson Plans

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]

10 Christmas Themed Young Adult Books