Because a Little Bug Went Ka-Choo!: 10/16/06

Theodor S. Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, wrote Because a Little Bug Went Ka-Choo with Michael Frith and together they published under the name "Rosetta Stone." I was pretty sure it was a Seuss book by the meter of the text and the illustrations but I double checked at the Library of Congress just to be sure. I just don't know why Geisel started making up new pen names for his children's books, since he'd successfully been using the Dr. Seuss name for so many years.

Anyway, Sean borrowed the Little Bug book from school on Friday and we read it a number of times this weekend. It is a classic Seuss story with a plot that starts simple and rapidly gets out of hand. It also serves as a child's introduction to chaos theory. Think of the film The Butterfly Effect but do it with a seussian bug and have it end with a traveling circus pandemonium unleashed on an unsuspecting nearby city.

Sean likes the book for how things quickly escalate. He can follow the logic of a bug's sneeze upsetting a worm and delights as things get crazy (around the time Farmer Brown gets a bucket on his head). He usually likes to stop and ask a question on each page to understand the cause and effect of each action and to discuss alternative reactions. Reading books to him is never as simple of starting with the first page and going to the last page. Book reading with him is more of a discourse.

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