What Dr. Seuss Did For Reading

National Read Across America Day is celebrated on March 2nd, the birthday of Dr. Seuss. The annual event is part of Read Across America, an initiative on reading creative by the National Education Association. Since the event is designed to encourage reading in children and is fostered through the schools, when March 2nd lands on a weekend, the day is observed on the closest school day.

Theodor Geisel - 1957

Dr. Seuss was born Theodor Geisel, in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1904. He published his first book for children, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, in 1937. But it was in 1955 when an educational specialist asked him if he would write a book to help children learn how to read that his fame really grew.

Seuss was given a list of 300 words that most first-graders know, and he had to write the book using only those words. Seuss wasn’t sure he could do it, but as he looked over the list, two words jumped out at him: “cat” and “hat.”

Seuss spent the next nine months writing what would become The Cat in the Hat (1957). That book is 1,702 words long, but it uses only 220 different words.

The genius of his approach was that children could read books on their own because of the repetition, rhyming and limited vocabulary needed.

A few years later, Seuss’s publisher bet him $50 that he could not write a book using only 50 different words. Seuss won the bet with his book Green Eggs and Ham (1960), which uses exactly 50 different words. Only one of those words has more than one syllable: the word “anywhere.”

Dr. Seuss Official website seussville.com