Hooray for Diffendoofer Day!

• Miss Loon, Mr. Plunger, Miss Bonkers--Diffendoofer School is just full of off-the-wall eccentrics! Though most of us aren't quite as zany as the characters in Hooray for Diffendoofer Day!, all of us have zany hobbies, habits or secret dreams. Poll the teachers (and other employees students know well) at your school, and post as many things as these people will admit to. See whether the kids can figure out which "zaniness" belongs to which person.
• Continue with eccentrics outside your school and look for inventors, politicians and other movers-and-shakers in history who have a few distinctive foibles. Post them as you find them, along with a list of names of course, so students can match them up. Bring the hunt for eccentrics into literature and post the names of characters from books you've read who walk to the beat of a different drummer. Have children match the characters with their book titles.
• Have some fun with "The Diffendoofer Song" at the end of the story. It works well to the tune of Cornell University's "Far Above Cayuga's Waters," as well as Washington & Lee University's fight song. If these aren't familiar (and you can't find them on the Internet), try singing "The Diffendoofer Song" to the tune of "America the Beautiful" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Then, turn the kids loose to find other tunes or other poems they can sing with these songs.
• Study the book from a critical perspective. Look for touches that are uniquely Seuss. Some of the lines of poetry sound just like him, others are more Prelutsky than Seuss. The illustrations, too, are also partly Seuss and partly Smith. To do this, the children will have to reacquaint themselves with Seuss, Prelutsky and Smith. After going through a few books each has done, take another look at Diffendoofer. What differences can you see? For instance, Seuss's illustrations are usually more curvy than Smith's, and Seuss showed great vistas in many of his illustrations. Smith is more apt to work with angles and close-ups. Prelutsky's lines of text are usually shorter than Seuss's, and Prelutsky uses shorter character names.
• Stepping a bit further away from the book itself, there's a moral in Hooray for Diffendoofer Day! about learning and discovering what we already know. With your class, make a list of things you know and have done together that no test can ever discover.