I attended MPH Kidz Club's party for The Cat in the Hat's 50th birthday this afternoon.
Put on the hat and you turn into some sort of psycho, I swear ...
I-Shan gets into the spirit of the Cat ... or maybe it's the Grinch ...
Tots to Teens, Star Mag
11 March 2007 Fete that hat cat!
THE Cat in the Hat turns 50 this year. And I’ll be 40 in April. But I
didn’t grow up with this book or anything else by Dr Seuss. My first
encounter with the author was when I read The Sneetches and Other Stories to my eldest, Elesh.
I admit I was quite surprised. I didn’t quite know what to make of Dr
Seuss’ odd-looking, eccentric characters. Elesh loved them, though.
He would squeal with delight and horror whenever his dad read him the story called What Was I Scared Of? It’s a tale, in verse, of “a pair of pale green pants with nobody inside them”. The narrator (one of Dr Seuss’s strange creatures of indeterminate species) keeps encountering the pants and is terrified of them. The first time he sees them they’re just standing there, motionless. And then they move! Elesh used to shriek whenever we came to this bit. It’s still my favourite story by Dr Seuss.
His books are a joy to read aloud because of the meter he uses. You don’t think of it because you’re busy being distracted by his crazy characters and nonsense words, but Dr Seuss usually wrote in anapestic tetrameter.
I don’t want to get technical here but the point is, Dr Seuss had rhythm! When you read a poem and you don’t stumble and it doesn’t sound clumsy, you know the author has rhythm!
Children (especially very little ones) love it
when the story is written in verse with even, regular beats so that the
words sort of gallop off your tongue and theirs.
Rhythm helps the words stick in their heads too, just as rhymes do. You know, like, 30 days has September, April, June, and November – now you’ll never forget which months have 30 days!
What I didn’t know about Dr Seuss and The Cat in the Hat until recently is that the story is written using just 236 unique words.
Also, of the 236 words, just one has three syllables, 14 have two and 221 are monosyllabic! As I like to tell my students: keep it simple. Simple works!
The Cat in the Hat was written in response to a Life magazine article criticising the boring primers used in schools. In it, the writer, John Hersey challenged Dr Seuss to write a story “first graders wouldn’t be able to put down”.
The book was, of course, a huge success. It was used to supplement school reading programmes, as were many of the author’s subsequent books.
Today, it’s as popular as ever and is the inspiration for Project 236, an American literacy initiative organised by Dr Seuss Enterprises, Random House and First Book, an organisation that provides children from low income families with new books.
Getting into the spirit of things is MPH Kidz Club, which is organising a 50th birthday party for the Cat at MPH 1Utama (Petaling Jaya, Selangor) this afternoon at 2pm. The plan is for some members of the club to read aloud an excerpt of The Cat in the Hat at 2.36pm!
I’m going to be there and will encourage every adult present (as well as anyone reading this column) to buy a copy of the book or any Dr Seuss book (or any children’s book for that matter) and donate it to a children’s charity of his choice.
Maybe you can help start a library at your local orphanage or the children’s ward at your local hospital. Or you could volunteer to read to the children at these places.
What I love best about The Cat in the Hat (and all Dr Seuss stories) is their irreverence and exuberance. Even the odd characters with their strange quirks are a challenge to think out of the box and open your imagination to things new and different.
Will the Cat still be swaggering down the book aisles in 50 years’ time? I think he will. As long as children (of all ages) are eager to take the sort of exciting journey that can only be experienced within the pages of a good book, they’ll find that the Cat makes an excellent travelling companion.
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