Yertle the Turtle Stacking Game

On a day when we celebrate a great American leader, I’m so happy to be bringing you this particular Seuss inspired activity! It’s as much about an oppressed turtle named Mack as it is about Yertle. I hope you enjoy it!





Yertle the Turtle is the title story in a collection by Theodor Geisel and it is by far one of my favorite Seuss tales.* It tells of Yertle, the king of the turtles, who grows unhappy with his modest stone throne and commands all the other turtles to form a stack so that he may sit upon them and be the highest in all the land. I’m sure you can guess what happens. The book ends with this great line,

“And turtles, of course ... all the turtles are free

As turtles, and maybe, all creatures should be.”

For this activity, you will need to read Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories, it’s a must! You’ll also need:

• at least 10 stackable stones (try to keep your number even if you're going to be playing with more than one child)
• paintbrushes and spouncers
• green paint in two shades

Use the paint to turn your stones into turtles! You can get as fancy, or simple, as you want. I let the kids do the painting and it took them less than 10 minutes. We divided the turtles in half and made light and dark turtles by using the spouncer to create a body and a brush to paint a head, tail, legs, and arms.


To play all you need to do is start stacking. If you’ve painted two different types of turtles you can see who can stack the fastest or highest. We took turns making one giant stack, like in the story, it’d get pretty high before it’d tip over!

*Can I let you in on a little secret? Over ten years ago I took a single-author course on Theodore Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss). It wasn’t as easy a class as you might have imagined, and like most artist profile studies, afterward, I was left with a conflicted view of the man behind the phenomenon. Maybe that’s why I’m just now getting around to creating a Seuss project. Despite the misgivings I may have about his personal life, I still respect his talent, in particular his later works, like Yertle, that spoke to the societal issues of his time that trouble us to this day.