My inspiration for today's post came in the strangest of places. This past weekend, we attended my brother's college graduation. Like other people with small children, we happily situated ourselves at the back of audience so that we could get up and let the kids run around a bit outside if need be. At one point towards the end of the 2 1/2 hour ceremony, my daughter was sitting in my lap, snuggling up against me and talking quietly to herself. It didn't take me long to notice that she was reciting part of a story. "Stop, dog, stop! The light is red. Go, dog, go! It's green ahead." She repeated these phrases to herself for a while, unaware that I was listening, occasionally mentioning some of the story's other lines, as well: "You're almost there. Stop at that tree. Climb that ladder to a dog party!" The story?
Go, Dog, Go!, a classic early reader book by P.D. Eastman. We've actually been reading the abridged board book version (
Go, Dog, Go! P.D. Eastman's Book of Things That Go, shown below), but both are wonderfully fun. The simple, repetitive, rhyming text, and the silly, colorful pictures make this book a great one for emerging readers and toddlers, alike. This book was also one of the first that my son ever read aloud by himself. I'm surprised I haven't featured it on here yet!
Books like this one are classics for a reason. Something about them magically connects and sticks with children across generations. I can count on one hand the number of times we have read that story in the past month, and yet there was my daughter, not yet 3, reciting parts of it from memory over and over to herself. Don't you just love the way those little minds work? They never cease to amaze me.
If you haven't yet checked out the works of P.D. Eastman, look for them the next time you are the library.
Go, Dog, Go! and
Are You My Mother? are both delightfully fun.
1 comments:
I need to get this one for my youngest. She is obsessed with dogs, and we just read Big Dog, Little Dog.
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