30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant Encouragement for Memorization to Help Reading!, October 13, 2000
This review is from: I Can Read with My Eyes Shut! (Beginner Books(R)) (Library Binding)
This is a fabulous book that every parent should read with their children!
Researchers constantly find that reading to children is valuable in a variety of ways, not least of which are instilling a love of reading and improved reading skills. With better parent-child bonding from reading, your child will also be more emotionally secure and able to relate better to others. Intellectual performance will expand as well. Spending time together watching television fails as a substitute.
To help other parents apply this advice, as a parent of four I consulted an expert, our youngest child, and asked her to share with me her favorite books that were read to her as a young child. I Can Read with My Eyes Shut! was one of her picks.
To me, the brilliance of this book is in its title. This book encourages children to memorize this book. My four children all began to learn to read by first memorizing books. Then they could begin to match what they had memorized with words on the page. The next step was to then identify the word and be able to say it in an unmemorized book. Finally, they could read alone. Memorization is a key step, and I notice that many first-time parents don't realize that. Dr. Seuss provides the big clue here for children and parents. The choice of long words with funny sounds is particularly clever as a way to encourage memorizing. Who could decode Mississippi, Indianapolis, Hallelujah, Schenectady, and Wilkes-Barre the first time they saw them? Putting the place names on signs on a road emphasizes the child's obvious interest in becoming a driver some day. Brilliant!
Aside from the theme, the book has the great qualities of all Dr. Seuss's books for learning to read. There's lots of repetition. The adjectives can be translated into pictures, and the stories are humorously illustrated. For example, "I can read in red. I can read in blue. I can read in pickle color too." The four color words are all printed in a larger type size in the color described. The Cat in the Hat is wearing pickle color glasses that match the words "pickle color" in the sentence above. The rhyming scheme used throughout also makes it easier to memorize and progress.
The book also has wonderful conceptual material such as left and right examples, being upside down, and how the order of words in a sentence affects their meaning (mice on ice, and ice on mice).
Then lest your child get a subliminal message to ignore what is going on around you, Dr. Seuss points out the advantages of having your eyes open. "You'll miss the best things if you keep your eyes shut."
After you have helped your child to memorize this book and begin to notice these words around her or him, I suggest that you try writing a book like this with your child on the same theme. You will probably have to do the writing down of words, but your child can certainly do the illustrations. In the process, you can begin to help your child learn about rhyming if you want to be ambitious. Afterwards, I suggest that you ask your child to tell you how he or she is learning to read, to encourage more consciousness of the role of memorization. Your enjoyment of poetry will always be enhanced by memorization. I suggest you try some for yourself as well.
Remember this advice!
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This book was dedicated to my father, May 1, 2003
By A Customer
I may have a biased opinion, because this book was dedicated to my late father, David Worthen. My father was an ophthalmologist and operated on Dr. Seuss' eyes in the late 1970s. To me, this book is about the importance of sight, which allows us to read, learn, explore, and imagine. I hope that someone will duplicate it in braille so that non-sighted people can enjoy it too.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Just a fun book., June 17, 2000
This book struck me as being for children who are learning to read more than some of the other Seuss books. My son (only 2 1/2) likes it because of the Cat in the Hat and the little cat following him around. One of the things about the book is the not-so-subtle message that yes, you can read (see the world) with your eyes shut, but you can see much more with them open.
It's a nice thought.
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