Animal Speeds and The Cat in the Hat

Well, where do I start? For a few weeks, Rowan was obsessed with Dr. Seuss books and demanded to be read stacks of them multiple times a day...

(And books that look like Dr. Seuss books...)
One after the other...
So we watched The Grinch, Green Eggs and Ham, Sneetches, Horton Hears a Who, and The Cat in the Hat.  
That wasn't enough, so we got The Cat in the Hat movie from 2005 (you know, the really bad one) and the kids fell in love with it 'cause it was "The silliest movie we've ever seen!" I never thought I'd let them watch something like that, but... WHATEVER IT TAKES! (Whatever it takes to make them happy, to make them inspired, to make them laugh...) So now we watch it EVERY DAY. Really, it looks like we do all these amazing educational things but in actuality we watch Cat in the Hat all day! :)

  ***
Because Fynn loves whales, we have also been watching a show called Wild Kratts about two brothers who adventure all over the world discovering different animals.  We watched the whale episode, which led us to the cheetah episode, and looking back, I think that's where we learned about cheetahs for the first time; that they can run 76 mph (the fastest runners on land), that their main food is gazelle, et cetera. Fynn became a runner; his goal being to run 76 mph like a cheetah, or at least to run as fast as Usain Bolt, the fastest human runner (top speed 27 mph!). From the cheetah we became curious about other animal speeds and found out that gazelle run 35 mph, Thompson's Gazelle run 48 mph, Pronghorn antelope can run up to 60 mph (the all-around best runner for speed and stamina) and the Peregrine Falcon is the all time fastest animal with a diving speed of 242 mph but would be beat by a pigeon in a horizontal flight race! We made a huge chart of the animals with their speeds and posted it on the wall to add to when needed (not pictured).
 

Can you see the cheetah running 76 mph? He's practically a blur!

On our road trip to Texas early January, Fynn was into all those speed limit signs. When we got home, he made a bunch of speed limit signs for the balls who were rolling across the floor.

Here's the speed-o-meter at 76 mph.

Gazelle speed!

That gave me the idea to make speed limit signs for all our fast animals.

And then for our Cat in the Hat characters... and Fynn running Light Speed.

What do we do with these speed limit signs? Our house has become a race track, and we race in different animal speeds!
We also made some creature power discs (from Wild Kratts) so we can race with even more animal powers!.

Cat in the Hat balancing act!

 

The Cat in the Hat plays piano!

Balancing Act...

Now I have two trivia questions for you. Answer correctly and you win a virtual high five!
1. Which book pictured is not by Dr. Seuss?
2. Which book is this "He went past fast" from?

Happy learning!
~Beth