My daughter's bedroom. Photo by Ariane Coffin.
I grew up in a French-speaking town so Dr. Seuss was just not part of my childhood like it is for many kids in the US.
When I moved to California, I took a job as a mother’s helper while I attended college. One evening, their 5-year-old son asked if I could read to him a Dr. Seuss book. It was my first ever exposure to Dr. Seuss so I didn’t know what to expect. At the time, my English was not so great and my tongue stumbled on every other word throughout the book. All the repeating sounds, unusual sentence structure, silly made-up words, and tricky tongue-twisters were a foreigner’s nightmare. The little boy kept asking me to “read it faster! faster!” Meanwhile I could hear the parents in the next room dying of laughter at my train wreck of a reading session.
I have to admit it was pretty funny, but I still labeled Dr. Seuss as evil in my head and dismissed his books into the category of Things I Most Definitively Do Not Like, where it stayed for a very long time.
Then many years later I had a baby. Through gifts, Dr. Seuss sneakily made its way into my home. I read a few of the books with a fresh perspective and could not believe how fantastic and non-evil they really were after all!
My husband and I strive to expose our daughter to shows and books that demonstrate facts and the scientific method, without necessarily being educational per se. We love Curious George and the Cat in the Hat very much for that. We watch a little bit of Curious George on PBS almost every day, and own most of the Cat in the Hat’s Learning Library books. Both provide a huge focus on problem solving (most often through hypothesis testing, analogy, trial and error, and divide and conquer) and critical thinking skills (like evidence through observation, data collection and interpretation, reasoning within and beyond given assumptions, and clear communication without explicit language skills).
Plus, they’re just really fun!
When we bought our first home a few months ago, it was the perfect opportunity to upgrade our toddler from her nursery room to a big girl room. We browsed around the internet to decide on a theme for her new room, and were happy to find two of our favorite characters at Pottery Barn Kids: Cat in the Hat and Curious George.
Read more about the decorations in Ariane Coffin’s post at GeekMom.
