Hullabaloo Stories Design Blog

Use modern technology to engage your children in reading? Yes you read that right. Reading with your child can incorporate modern technology, these varied formats can help to engage them in the process of reading and help them to understand the idea of the book.

Since we are celebrating Read Across America and Dr. Seuss’ birthday lets look at the world of Dr. Seuss and all the ways to read his books. Besides the traditional hardcover books there are so many ways to engage your children in the world of Dr. Seuss.

This is the first in a series of blog posts about various formats of multimedia.

Today we will look at movies, in recent years there have been several Dr. Seuss books made into movies (Dr. Seuss’ The Cat In The Hat and Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas), the most recent movie was Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who and this Friday The Lorax is being released nationwide. This movie is based on the story The Lorax , a story largely about ecological awareness, even though it was written in the early 1970’s the message still rings true today and is an important message of taking care of our environment. The story is engaging and as always, Dr. Seuss’ books are entertaining and imaginative. The movie will likely be just as entertaining, especially considering the cast of stars lending their voices to Dr. Seuss’ characters.

Taking young children to the movie theater can be really fun, but also overwhelming if they do not have a concept of the story before seeing it. One strategy to help your children understand a movie is to sit down with them and read the story. But instead of simply reading cover to cover, ask them questions. Have them predict what is going on based on the pictures and pick out what ideas seem important to them. This will give your children confidence in their own reading (pre-reading) skills and some ownership in the story.

Once the movie is over you can continue to engage them in the story by re-reading the book and asking some of those same questions you asked them before, have them discuss what they learned, create a project, a drawing or some other way for them to show you what they have learned with the story. With a story that has a message like The Lorax does you can have your child take action, check out these coloring pages we made for our kids, the Read Across America site has some ideas for doing just that. Several associated sites are offering various activities for parents and teachers to share with children, including online games. These techniques of pre and post reading can be used for any book, reading the same book or going over the same story several times can be very helpful for children to learn how to read and what the process of reading includes. For some more tips, check out this great blog post here on I Can Teach My Child

Below are some coloring book pages (in full color) click on the link above to download the coloring book pages.

Disclaimer: The Lorax and other Dr. Seuss books are copyrighted by Random House, Inc. Dr. Seuss properties ™ & © 1937-2011. These books are available at Amazon.com and many other booksellers. The purpose of this post is to encourage parental/child interaction with these literary works and pre-reading skills and not to seek gain in the form profit by mentioning them here.