Thing One and Thing Two: Play and Reading on Dr. Seuss's Birthday

Each year, Dr. Seuss's birthday gives us a reason not only to celebrate reading, but to be wonderfully silly about it. Today, in schools around the country, teachers and young students are cooking up green eggs, making a goofy red-and-white hats, and tromping around in their pajamas for "bedtime" stories in honor of "Read Across America" Day.

And children are not only imbibing in literacy lunacy during school. Surely many are also reading ... on a train. Or in the rain. Or in a box, and with a fox. They are reading here and there. They are reading anywhere.

Dr. Seuss's genius makes us yearn for more moments of play in literacy instruction. Experts on reading have been writing about the connection between play and reading for years (often citing Dr. Seuss), but sometimes we can get so caught up in the demands of de-coding that we take the fun out of it.

"Using playful teaching and learning not only makes instruction more enjoyable but also makes reading and writing real, engaging, and authentic," wrote Patricia Scully and Hilary Roberts, an education professor at elementary school teacher, in research on playful literacy published in the Early Childhood Education Journal in 2004.

Many teachers do strive to put play and reading together. But everyone needs a little inspiration every so often, so take a minute to check out the advice given by Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff in their book, Einstein Never Used Flashcards. And consider this very helpful paper, "From Play to Literacy: Implications for the Classroom," by Sara Wilford, a longtime early childhood researcher and author of the 1997 book What You Need to Know When Your Child is Learning to Read. 

If you're a parent, indulge in some Dr. Seuss yourself. Just reading his lines makes me want to tell my young daughters: Oh! The books you will read! Today is your day. You're reading for fun! You're off and away! You have brains in your head. You have words in your mind. You can read under the covers. Your mother won't mind.