Horton Hears a Who! What a wonderful book to have in the classroom...

In my future classroom I would love to have Horton Hears a Who! as a part of my collection. I just feel this is a great book about helping others, standing up for what you believe in, and helping the small people. Every child needs to learn this kind of lesson. I also love Dr. Seuss and believe all of his books are worth reading and are kid friendly. I saw the movie that just came out with my boyfriend and absolutly fell in love. It was such a good movie, and I was suprised my boyfriend liked it as much as he did. After reading the book to take to a classroom tomorrow to share with a student for my Edu 255 class, I knew I would need to add it to my collection. The theme of this book is about helping others no matter how small they are. When Horton hears a small sound he looks around and finds a small speck of dust. The dust has creatures living on it called the Whos. They need help and Horton is the only one for a while that will help him until the other animals finally hear the Whos and decide to help them as well. Horton never gives up in his determination to save the Whos. The main story element exemplified is the theme, because the other animals besides Horton go from wanting to hurt the speck of dust, to wanting to save it. This theme of helping others is greatly illustrated in the end when all of the animals gather around to protect the speck and the kangaroo that wanted to get rid of it most in the beginning, now wants to help the speck. Some questions I could ask students are if they were Horton would they save the whos and why do they think Horton saved them? I would relate this to  the Science curriculum and ask them if they thought there were any planets besides Earth and if they thought they were bigger or smaller? I would ask them if it was important to help a person smaller than them and how they could help a person smaller than them. I would finally ask them why they didn't think the animals believe Horton the first time and if they felt like no one paid attention to them sometimes. An activity I could do with them is have them draw a picture and write a couple of sentences of when they helped someone smaller than them.