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

          

Pooh Bear and Gender Identity

Image: Creative Commons Zero - CC0

I hadn't thought about it lately, but I know as a young reader I wonder about whether Winnie the Pooh was a boy or girl. The voice in the Disney animated cartoons sounded like a male but the name sounded female. But it didn't really concern me, which is probably a good thing.

Then I saw online that October 14 was the day in 1926 that Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne was published. Some consider this to be Pooh's birthday.

Milne was a writer for the British humor magazine Punch. He published stories and poem there earlier that were for children or whimsical adult readers.

The first Pooh story, “In Which We are Introduced to Winnie-the-Pooh and Some Bees and the Stories Begin,” was published in The London Evening News on Christmas Eve in 1925 and then broadcast on the BBC on Christmas Day.

It was only in my adult life that I discovered that although Milne based the Pooh stories on his son, Christopher Robin, and his son’s stuffed bear, he didn’t even read those stories aloud to his son.

There are several modern films about Milne and his son's complicated relationship. In the imagined story of Christopher Robin, he encounters his childhood friend Winnie the Pooh in the flesh (or fur or fuzz) and Pooh helps him remember the importance of wonder and make-believe. In the much more serious and satisfying film, Goodbye Christopher Robin, we get deeper into the actual relationship (or lack thereof) between author A.A. Milne, and his son.

The gender of Winnie-the-Pooh is brought up in that first book:

“Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn’t. Anyhow, here he is at the bottom, and ready to be introduced to you. Winnie-the-Pooh.
“When I first heard his name, I said, just as you are going to say, ‘But I thought he was a boy?’
“‘So did I,’ said Christopher Robin.
“‘Then you can’t call him Winnie?’
“‘I don’t.’
“‘But you said —’
“‘He’s Winnie-ther-Pooh. Don’t you know what “ther” means?’
“‘Ah, yes, now I do,’ I said quickly; and I hope you do too, because it is all the explanation you are going to get.”

Not a very satisfying explanation but then that may be the point: the gender doesn't matter.

From "Christopher Robin leads an expedition" Pooh's sign says "North Pole, Discovered by Pooh, Pooh found It". 

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