Dr Seuss

We love Dr Seuss. I never tire of reading it out loud. They are not always the first books Ella chooses for me to read to her, but our new 3-in-1 book inlcuding The Cat in the Hat, The Cat in The Hat Comes Back and Dr Seuss' ABC has been her favourite too for the past few nights.

[For those who don't know the book:
it's about a cat who visits 2 bored kids while their mum is out and ends up turning the house upside down with his tricks and games. Just as the mother is about to walk in, he picks up all the mess and the mother doesn't suspect a thing when she asks her angelic kids if they had fun while she was out.]

The first time we read Cat in the Hat she seemed a bit confused by the "What would you do if your mother asked you?" question and I discovered she did not actually know the word 'mother'! I always get such a shock when I discover such an important gap in her vocabulary, which is rather large for her age otherwise. How could I have missed teaching her the word 'mother'?

Last night when I asked her "What would you do if your mother asked you?" her reply was: "I'd … err ... say that I … err … played with the cars!". It seemed strange to encourage her to lie to her mother!

The 3d story in our new book is Dr Seuss' ABC. I thought an alphabet book would be really boring and I'm not all that motivated to encourage Ella learning to read. I think there is plenty of time for that and she's better off to concentrate on social, motor and language skills for now. But this book is clever (and fun like all Seuss books are of course). I couldn't think of a better way to illustrate the use of the F than saying "four fluffy feathers on a fiffer-feffer feff".

We do have the same argument every night when we get to the page that lists the letters of the alphabet up to the P. For K L M N O P, Ella says "Kan Elle Man No P". And when I try to correct her she insists that the way I say it is not "the way it goes". I end up calling her a smarty pants, tell her very childishly that she's 3 and I'm 38 and surely I know the alphabet better than she does and I end up rolling my eyes and telling her that if she wants to believe she knows better than that's fine with me. Which it obviously isn't but I recognise that stubborn gene and I understand that no reasoning is going to change her mind once she's convinced she's right.