Archive for April, 2011

You can read them in a box,
You can read them with a fox!

They discovered seven new Seuss stories you see,
Filled with crafty rhymes for you to read.

But don’t go to the store yet, please remember…
They won’t be published until September!

Yes, you’ve got it right—seven new Dr. Seuss stories have been discovered, and they will be published in a new book called The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories by Dr. Seuss.

The stories were published in the 1950s in magazines, but they have never been put into book form before. They are being published by Random House.

Charles D. Cohen discovered the stories. He is a dentist by trade but a serious Dr. Seuss scholar on the side. He has the largest private collection of Seuss memorabilia in the world.

The new book will have seven stories in it, including Steak for Supper, about fantastic creatures who follow a boy home hoping for a steak dinner; The Bippolo Seed, in which a scheming feline leads an innocent duck to make a bad decision, and The Strange Shirt Spot, which was the inspiration for the bathtub-ring scene in The Cat in the Hat Comes Back.

Random House says the stories in this book are a departure from his rhyming approach to kid-lit.

Share these outrageous Seuss facts with your kids (you may have to censor some of them)

* His real name was Theodor (Ted) Geisel.

* His car license plate was GRINCH.

* He wrote 44 books for children.

* Some of his most popular books are: And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street (his first book, published in 1937), The Cat in the Hat (1957), Green Eggs and Ham (1960), One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish (1960), Oh, the Places You’ll Go! (1990) and Hop on Pop (1963).

* He won a Pulitzer Prize for Literature, an Academy Award, three Emmy Awards and a Grammy. (A Grammy!)

* Why did he change his name from Geisel to Seuss? He got in trouble in college (drinking in his dorm room, yes that’s what I said) and the Dean said he could no longer be editor of the school magazine where he published his cartoons. Instead of stopping, he just published his cartoons under different names: L. Pasteur, D. G. Rossetti, T. Seuss and Seuss. He used “Dr.” to jokingly make his name sound more important. (Dr. Rebel, if you ask me.)

* He nearly became a scholar but his girlfriend, Helen Palmer, (who he married in 1927) pointed out that he was more of a draw-er than a scholar.

* His first job out of college was drawing ads, including an ad for a bug spray called Flit. Everyone knew his ad’s catchphrase, “Quick, Henry – the Flit!”

* He started writing for children because his contract with the ad agency precluded him from writing for adults.

* Seuss never had any children with his first wife, Helen Palmer. However, they “made up” lots of pretend children: Chrysantemum-Pearl, Norval, Wally, Wickersham, Miggles, Boo-Boo and Thnud. They would invite neighbourhood children over to pose with them for their annual Christmas card and tell everyone, “these are our children.”

* More than two dozen publishers rejected his first book, And To Think That I Saw it On Mulberry Street. Seuss was walking down Madison Avenue, about to throw his manuscript away, when he met up with an old school chum, Mike McClintock. McClintock was an editor with Vanguard Press, and immediately gave Seuss his first book contract. Seuss later would say that if he’d been walking on the other side of the street he might have ended up a dry cleaner.

* Several of his books (Yertle the Turtle, The Sneetches, Horton Hears a Who!) were written as metaphors against racism. The famous phrase from Horton, “A person’s a person, no matter how small,” offers “a rhymed lesson in protection of minorities and their rights,” the Des Moines Register wrote in a book review.

* He wrote Cat in the Hat because he was frustrated by reports about low literacy rates among children. He felt that kids needed more interesting beginner-reader books than Dick and Jane.

* He wrote Green Eggs and Ham after someone bet him he couldn’t write a book using less than 50 words.

Related Links

The publisher of the new book is Random House.

Random House’s Dr. Seuss website.

See how many Dr. Seuss books you recognize.

There are (not surprisingly – did you read those facts?!) a number of biographies about Dr. Seuss. We got our facts from the Random House site and there’s plenty more where they came from. Read more about Dr. Seuss’s fascinating life.

I read an article in which the author says, basically, most praise is bad.

It stayed with me, because:

1) I know that as a parent I probably do praise too much; and

2) he’s probably right; and

3) I’m not going to stop praising my son.

Alfie Kohn is a renowned education expert and he’s looked at a lot of research. I believe that he knows what he’s talking about.

I also believe that I disagree with him.

But you may not. Or, like me, you may choose to take some of what he says and discard the rest and that’s OK too.

Here’s why he says praising isn’t a good idea

Every time we say, “Good job!” to a child we’re just getting them to comply to our wishes—when we’re around. It does nothing to motivate them to positive behaviour when we’re not there to say “good job.”

We’re creating “praise junkies.” Kids who are told they’re doing a “good job” every time they clap or eat neatly will grow into adults who need constant external validation.

We steal their pleasure. By saying “good job,” we’re telling the child how to feel about their accomplishment; it’s just as much an evaluation as “bad job!” he says.

Diminishing their interest. Studies show that kids who are frequently praised ultimately end up feeling less like doing the thing they were praised for.

Undermining achievement. Praised kids become less likely to take risks once they start focusing on how to keep the positive comments coming, than on the task at hand.

He says that based on this evidence, it’s clear that most parents praise more because “they want to say it than because children need to hear it.”

I’d like to suggest a compromise

Have you ever intellectually understood something while at the same time your gut is saying, “this just ain’t right for me.” That’s how I’m feeling about all of this.

Yes, I can see how empty words—of any kind, and not just praise—become like background noise to a child. Empty calories the child begins to crave without getting any nutritional benefit.

But I’m suggesting a compromise (praising, but doing it thoughtfully), and here are my reasons:

1) It feels unnatural to me, to hold back praise when I’m really stoked about something my kid has done. As I’ve learned time and again, when I’m parenting “according to a book,” it backfires. Onto my kid, usually.

2) How many times during our childhoods (yours, mine) did we do something we thought was great, only to have our accomplishment completely ignored. Did that take the wind out of our sails? You bet it did. How I would have loved to have even a casually tossed off, “good job!” then. At least it would have shown that someone was watching.

3) Alfie Kohn is making the assumption that if we don’t praise we will instead have a thoughtful, intensive discussion with our child about his accomplishment—that we’ll be able to take the time we’ve saved by not praising and use it for quality parenting. Well maybe, but we might also just miss the opportunity altogether and, say, fold the laundry.

4) Intent is really what’s being looked at, here. (And Kohn acknowledges this in his essay.) If you’re genuinely thrilled by what your child has done and you blurt out, “good job!” I don’t think the child is going to get a mixed message. But if you’re just going through the motions, tossing out, “good job”s like so many shillings to urchins then your kid is going to wonder why what he’s hearing isn’t making him feel better.

I’m going to think more about this. It’s obviously an Achilles heel of mine or I wouldn’t be so bothered about it. Or confused. In the meantime, Kohn says there are things we should do to replace praising so much.

1) Say nothing.

2) Say what you saw (“You drew some mountains!”)

3) Talk less, ask more.

Do check out his essay for more insight. And while you’re at it, check out his other interesting thoughts on parenting and education on his website. And then, because I can’t get the song out of my head, why not check out the movie Alfie.

(Resisting, resisting, resisting the temptation to end this post with, “Good job, Alfie!”)

I guess the idea of a one-sentence journal isn’t new. But I’d never heard of it before I read about it on Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project blog.

She started a one-sentence journal because she wanted to jot down happy memories but knows she could never sustain keeping a normal journal for any length of time.

I thought: What a great idea for kids. Every day, all you have to write is one sentence. (Or draw a picture – or even take a photograph, for that matter).

That’s it – just one sentence. You put the date, and under it your write whatever comes to your mind when you think back on your day. Maybe it was something that made you happy (or sad or excited). Or maybe it was someone you saw or talked to, or something you did that was a little different.

Or maybe something you learned. A life lesson! Imagine being 30 or 40 years old and being able to look back at your top-of-mind thoughts from when you were a kid, all the things you learned? That would be pretty cool.

Kids would get lots out of keeping a one-sentence journal. For one thing, boys especially often don’t get enough opportunities to express their emotions and a one-sentence journal is a great place to do that. And if your kid is like mine maybe his or her fine motor skills aren’t great, so writing is sometimes a chore. But they can write one sentence a day.

Or, they can type their journal on the computer. My son doesn’t get weekday video or computer time, but I’d make this an exception each evening. He’d like that.

Since I read Gretchen Rubin’s post, I’ve been keeping my own one-sentence journal. So far I’ve got some pretty fun stuff — and we’re only on day two (but to be fair, one of the days was April Fool’s Day so that’s automatically going to be a juicy one). I can’t wait until I can look back at a month’s worth of one-sentencing.

I’m also going to start my son on a one-sentence journal. And we won’t wait too long before we go back and read the entries, so he’ll have some supporting gratification right away, for having done it.

And you know, it occurs to me now that not only is one sentence a day a “doable” amount to write–but it’ll also be a reasonable amount for kids to read, as well. A one-sentence journal is a great way to get your kid writing – and reading.