Dr. Seuss and Read Across America Day!

Today is Read Across America Day (which is celebrated on Dr. Suess' birthday.) To celebrate this year our little boys will be eating green eggs and ham for lunch. And we'll read that book too! Maybe One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish too because I always liked that one when I was little. We'll read all day! For our big kids it is double the bedtime stories! (Meaning we'll read two chapters of this book to them tonight instead of one. They are always begging for more.)And even though it is Dr. Seuss' birthday my kids will each get a present tonight... a new book. :)

Now something I learned about Dr. Seuss and kids... When my oldest was a brand new baby I joined the Dr. Seuss book club and was mailed one Dr. Seuss book/month for about a year. I read them to my little guy because we didn't have very many books then so I read what we had. As my kids got older they did not like me to read them Dr. Seuss. I was perplexed... how can a kid NOT like Dr. Seuss. One year on Dr. Seuss birthday my kids came home from preschool wearing tall red and white hats and my daughter declared, "Today is Dr. Seuss' birthday. We had a party. I do not like Dr. Seuss books they are boring and weird."

Then, one day a few months later, when that same child was a newish reader I found her reading a stack of Dr. Seuss books to her little brother. She suddenly loved Dr. Seuss because the rhyming words and rhythm made his books easy, fun books to read by herself. (Definitely more fun than the controlled vocabulary books she was bringing home from school.) She loved to read Dr. Seuss for about a year and then she moved onto bigger and better things... like chapter books :). So don't panic if your little kids don't like Dr. Seuss. Wait until they are reading a little and use them to build confidence in a beginning reader.

Anyway... Happy Read Across America today!