How The Cat In The Hat Forever Changed How We Teach Children To Read

The Cat In The Hat. It’s an innocent children’s book with very little substance, but kids love it. It contains no politics, and only 1,626 words, made up of 236 different words, repeated throughout the book, with 54 of them occurring only once.

Simple.

Basic.

And a game-changer for education.

Prior to the popularity of the Cat In The Hat, children were taught to read using the Dick and Jane method.

See Dick.

See Dick Run.

Run, Dick, Run.

That’s an example of the Dick and Jane method of reading. And the problem with it is that it didn't teach children to read. It taught them to memorize words.

In order to ‘read’ you have to understand phonetics, not simply to know how a word sounds, but how it sounds in relation to other similar words.

Dr. Seuss knew there was a different, better way. He understood that if you gave a child words that built on each other, such as ‘cat, hat, and at’, They would understand the concept of phonetics and therefore, reading.

Once educators realized that his technique was better, they ditched the Dick and Jane books and focused more on reading techniques that truly did teach children to read.

This is how this book changed the world. How will your book change the world?