Green Eggs and Ham Activities for Preschoolers and Toddlers
Looking for easy but fun activities to go along with the classic Dr. Seuss book Green Eggs and Ham for toddlers, preschoolers, and kindergarteners? We have lots of fun with this book every year around Dr. Seuss’ birthday, March 2nd. These activities are a great way to get your child more involved in the book, and they’re customizable to what interests your child.
First, Read the Book
Before, we start any Green Eggs and Ham activities, we go back and read the book again. Even if your child has read it before, it’s good to refresh their memory. Plus, it’s a great book to read with the silly rhymes and funny characters!
Reading over and over again can feel like a chore for adults, but repeating books helps young children with reading comprehension, critical thinking, and recognizing sight words. If you do want to break it up a little bit, try watching a video of the book being read like this one. Watching it online is also a great option if you don’t have a physical copy of the book.
A Fun Activity to Help Reading
One of the Dr. Seuss activities we like to do with most of the books is read while acting along with the characters. For young kids, we do this by making these cut out characters attached to Jenga pieces. This simple activity really helps kids better understand and take in what’s happening in the book.
You can find the free download of Dr. Seuss characters here. We just printed it out on regular white paper and had my son help cut some of them out. Then, follow along with the book while moving the characters around.
Make Your Own Green Eggs and Ham
First, what better way to study this book than by making delicious green eggs and ham yourself? All you need is a little green food coloring on scrambled eggs with pieces of ham! They seem to think its new foods, and get even more excited than just eating regular eggs and ham.
We did stop adding the green food coloring to the thick slices of ham because it doesn’t look that appealing. Now, we add small pieces of thin sliced ham to the green eggs.
Easy Green Eggs and Ham Craft
Next, we like to move on to this fun craft that’s easy enough for toddlers, but still great for kids of all ages. My own kids had a blast doing this one, and it requires minimal materials. Here’s what you’ll need:
- Green washable marker
- White Coffee Filters
- Spray bottle of water (or little plastic pipettes)
- Cookie sheet or tray
- Green Construction Paper
- Scissors and white glue
Green Egg Coffee Filter Craft
To make your fun green eggs craft, you’ll first have your child color the coffee filter with the green marker. This will be your egg white, but still try to get them as green as possible. We did three eggs, but you can make as many as you’d like.
Next, place the colored coffee filters onto the cookie sheet or tray. Then, spray with water until the coffee filters are entirely soaked. Spraying the water (or using pipettes) is a fun way to incorporate fine motor skills into this craft as well.
Then, cut out small circles from the green construction paper to make the inside egg shapes. If your child is old enough they can help with this step, and practice those important scissor skills!
Finally, once the coffee filters are completely dry, glue on the green yolk circles to the coffee filters.
Green Eggs and Ham STEM Activity
For a fun science activity to go along with this classic book, we decided to make our own green play dough. Then, using our homemade green play dough, we made our own plate of green eggs and ham. And the best part is that there’s so many different ways to make the eggs, so let your child explore all they want!
Green Play Dough Recipe
Here’s our easy recipe for homemade play dough:
- 1 cup salt
- 2 cups all-purpose flour
- 2 tablespoons alum
- 1 cup cold water
- 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
- Green food coloring
Mix together the salt, flour, alum, and drink mix/coloring/spices in a large bowl and stir. Make sure to break up any clumps. Pour in the cold water then the oil while mixing. Once the ingredients are basically combined, you can start kneading the play dough with your hands while adding in the green food coloring until it’s soft and pliable.
Related Read: Dr. Seuss Science Activities
Incorporating Math Skills
Play dough is a creative way to also incorporate math into your book activities. Help them count how many eggs you make together. It doesn’t require any extra materials, just focus on getting the correct number counting order and keeping a one-to-one ratio.
Related Read: More Fun Dr. Seuss Math Activities
Dr. Seuss Fine Motor Activity
Play dough is a great way to practice fine motor skills as kids try to make their colored eggs. We made egg shapes as well as ones that looked just like Sam’s green eggs from the book. Then, you can encourage them to make some of the other things in the book with play dough, like boats, trains, or houses to put their eggs in.
More Dr. Seuss Activities
Green Eggs and Ham is just one of the classic Dr. Seuss books we read during Dr. Seuss week. There’s tons and tons of fun ideas for the different books or just Dr. Seuss activities in general.
Related Read: Dr. Seuss Process Art Activities
Try Another Classic Book-Cat in the Hat
Another one of his most famous books, Cat in the Hat has tons of fantastic ideas for fun kids activities and crafts! We have a whole post about that book here.
Try a New Book- The Foot Book
A lesser known Dr. Seuss beginner book that’s still so much fun for young kids is The Foot Book. It’s one of our favorite to start with toddlers or early readers (you can see the whole list here), and there’s still lots of fun things to do with it you can read about here.
