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My wife has a masters in reading and language arts in early childhood education. Which means shes also a LOT better at reading to the kids than me. What i neve

My wife has a masters in reading and language arts in early childhood education. Which means shes also a LOT better at reading to the kids than me. What i never realized was that a LOT of these books, Eric Carles are in that camp, are using words chosen to teach kids basic language skills and sentence formation. The ones that dont really employ a lot of those learning mechanisms, seem to be the ones that we grow tired of quickly and hit the back of the stack.. Im sure Nostalgia is part of it too. Dr. Suess is similar and very heavy on sounds/aliteration. But you would be surprised to know that many of his books actually use very few words. Like Green Eggs and Ham is like 50 pages of sentence after sentence but only uses like 50 words total or something like that (i could be wrong, its one of the most famous ones that like that). Honestly when I read to my young kids, i would get tired of the same books over and over and would just kinda make up the story. Now that my kids are learning to actually read, I dont do that anymore.

ska 5y ago
> What i never realized was that a LOT of these books, This is part of a broader phenomenon, where most things are more complicated than you first think when you dig into it. This leads some people to assume work in areas they don't understand is easy.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- csours 5y ago
  I constantly assume that parts of my own job are easier than they turn out to be. 'That should only take 30 minutes' - winds up taking 2 calendar weeks.
  - croutonwagon 5y ago
    I have to typically impress in my first line support guys that “if you don’t want people to think your job is simple, then you shouldn’t assume the same of them” Heck I get people that think MY job is just clicking next on installers, there are entire swaths of things we do that others simply aren’t aware of because it’s transparent to them. I even had one lady question how much I made based on that very assumption. (She’s not a very nice person in general anyway)
    - _carbyau_ 5y ago
      Anecdote: I was in a corporate (software) packaging (and deployment) team for a fleet of ten thousand workstations. The new CIO knew not our role and assumed we were a physical packaging team, dealing with bubble wrap and cardboard boxes - "why do we pay them so much?" The CIO was educated pretty quickly. :-) edit: I had time, I wrote a shorter comment.
ftio 5y ago
YES — you're nailing something that I've felt but haven't been able to articulate. The worst children's books are ones that don't roll off the tongue, that use too-complicated phraseology, that through circumlocution challenge the rea—well, you get it. They trip me up!
triska 5y ago
This is similar to ABBA songs: Superficially, they seem very simple, but they are quite complex internally, and when something is repeated, then it is often repeated in a slightly different way.
jacobolus 5y ago
My understanding is that Dr. Seuss & P.D. Eastman books (among others) were primarily intended to be read by kids learning to read, not to be read aloud by parents. But I have personally found these books with extreme limited vocabulary to be much better read-aloud books for 2-year-olds than books for independent reading by 4–5 year-olds. More generally, many other graded readers are excellent read-aloud books. At age 2–3, my kids particularly enjoyed the Henry and Mudge books https://www.amazon.com/dp/1534427139 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1534427139, and everything by Arnold Lobel. If you are trying to teach kids to read, let me highly recommend Bloomfield’s workbook Let’s Read from the early 60s, which I heard about from a 2012 comment here on HN by Tokenadult. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0814311156 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0814311156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4665466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4665466 Bloomfield was one of the leading linguists of his era, and his book is very carefully structured to introduce only one new spelling–sound association per lesson, with the first half consisting of only regularly spelled words, so there is no possible confusion, with the full mishmash of irregular words only introduced after the reader is already fluent with regular spellings. My son & I started working through it together for about 10–15 minutes per day when he was 3.5 years old, and it took about 8 months to get to the end, after which he could fluently read pretty much any material he could comprehend. As a not-quite-5 year-old he now happily independently reads books intended for 3rd–4th graders. (I’m not trying to suggest every kid should start on such a project at that age; every kid is different, and interests and attention span vary.)
- croutonwagon 5y ago
  That’s interesting. I had some credits on Amazon so I got the book. I’ll check it out and see about working with my 5yo this summer. And that’s pretty amazing for your kid. That’s waaaaay above normal. We read every night to the kids, but we aren’t a huge reading family (if that makes sense)
- mncharity 5y ago
  Jim Keller (cpu designer): "I joke, like, I read books. And people think, 'Oh, you read books'. Well, no, I've read a couple of books a week, for [50] years."[1] Thought you might like. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA&t=5044s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA&t=5044s
anitil 5y ago
It may be an urban legend, but I think Green Eggs and Ham was based on a bet that Dr Suess couldn't write a book with less than 50 words long. Fair to say that he would have won that bet.
- a_e_k 5y ago
  Not only does it restrict itself to a 50 word vocabulary, but 49 of them are monosyllabic. The one exception is "anywhere".
cycomanic 5y ago
Actually the story about the Dr. Suess books is that they were deliberately written with only some limited number of words. IIRC there is a range of his books with fewer and fewer words, because he was getting challenged by his editor.

ska 5y ago

> What i never realized was that a LOT of these books, This is part of a broader phenomenon, where most things are more complicated than you first think when you dig into it. This leads some people to assume work in areas they don't understand is easy.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
csours 5y ago
I constantly assume that parts of my own job are easier than they turn out to be. 'That should only take 30 minutes' - winds up taking 2 calendar weeks.
- croutonwagon 5y ago
  I have to typically impress in my first line support guys that “if you don’t want people to think your job is simple, then you shouldn’t assume the same of them” Heck I get people that think MY job is just clicking next on installers, there are entire swaths of things we do that others simply aren’t aware of because it’s transparent to them. I even had one lady question how much I made based on that very assumption. (She’s not a very nice person in general anyway)
  - _carbyau_ 5y ago
    Anecdote: I was in a corporate (software) packaging (and deployment) team for a fleet of ten thousand workstations. The new CIO knew not our role and assumed we were a physical packaging team, dealing with bubble wrap and cardboard boxes - "why do we pay them so much?" The CIO was educated pretty quickly. :-) edit: I had time, I wrote a shorter comment.

ftio 5y ago

YES — you're nailing something that I've felt but haven't been able to articulate. The worst children's books are ones that don't roll off the tongue, that use too-complicated phraseology, that through circumlocution challenge the rea—well, you get it. They trip me up!

triska 5y ago

This is similar to ABBA songs: Superficially, they seem very simple, but they are quite complex internally, and when something is repeated, then it is often repeated in a slightly different way.

jacobolus 5y ago

My understanding is that Dr. Seuss & P.D. Eastman books (among others) were primarily intended to be read by kids learning to read, not to be read aloud by parents. But I have personally found these books with extreme limited vocabulary to be much better read-aloud books for 2-year-olds than books for independent reading by 4–5 year-olds. More generally, many other graded readers are excellent read-aloud books. At age 2–3, my kids particularly enjoyed the Henry and Mudge books https://www.amazon.com/dp/1534427139 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1534427139, and everything by Arnold Lobel. If you are trying to teach kids to read, let me highly recommend Bloomfield’s workbook Let’s Read from the early 60s, which I heard about from a 2012 comment here on HN by Tokenadult. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0814311156 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0814311156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4665466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4665466 Bloomfield was one of the leading linguists of his era, and his book is very carefully structured to introduce only one new spelling–sound association per lesson, with the first half consisting of only regularly spelled words, so there is no possible confusion, with the full mishmash of irregular words only introduced after the reader is already fluent with regular spellings. My son & I started working through it together for about 10–15 minutes per day when he was 3.5 years old, and it took about 8 months to get to the end, after which he could fluently read pretty much any material he could comprehend. As a not-quite-5 year-old he now happily independently reads books intended for 3rd–4th graders. (I’m not trying to suggest every kid should start on such a project at that age; every kid is different, and interests and attention span vary.)

croutonwagon 5y ago
That’s interesting. I had some credits on Amazon so I got the book. I’ll check it out and see about working with my 5yo this summer. And that’s pretty amazing for your kid. That’s waaaaay above normal. We read every night to the kids, but we aren’t a huge reading family (if that makes sense)
mncharity 5y ago
Jim Keller (cpu designer): "I joke, like, I read books. And people think, 'Oh, you read books'. Well, no, I've read a couple of books a week, for [50] years."[1] Thought you might like. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA&t=5044s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA&t=5044s

anitil 5y ago

It may be an urban legend, but I think Green Eggs and Ham was based on a bet that Dr Suess couldn't write a book with less than 50 words long. Fair to say that he would have won that bet.

a_e_k 5y ago
Not only does it restrict itself to a 50 word vocabulary, but 49 of them are monosyllabic. The one exception is "anywhere".

cycomanic 5y ago

Actually the story about the Dr. Suess books is that they were deliberately written with only some limited number of words. IIRC there is a range of his books with fewer and fewer words, because he was getting challenged by his editor.